Sabine Moritz debuts at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin: ‘ROT GELB BLAU STAUB’, a dialogue between abstraction and figure

German painter Sabine Moritz (born 1969 in Quedlinburg) presents “ROT GELB BLAU STAUB” (“Red, yellow, blue, dust”), her first solo exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin (Potsdamer Straße), which stays open until 31 October 2026, as Artnet News announces in a recently published roundup.

The exhibition features twelve large-format canvases, grouped in threes, the artist’s first quadriptych, “Fragment einer Idylle (1–4)” (2026), a still life, as well as a selection of works on paper spread across the gallery’s second floor, covering three decades of her practice.

The exhibition title is inspired by the four classical elements — fire, air, earth and water — which Moritz uses as a starting point and organizing principle: concentrated fiery reds, cooler blues and greens, dense earthy tones. She does not try to illustrate the elements, but to treat them as hidden currents carrying themes through colour and mood.

The jewel of the exhibition is a new four-panel painting in which female forms appear amid loose, gestural brushwork. Since 2023, the artist has been experimenting with the return of the figure into otherwise wholly abstract fields — an approach navigating between distinguishable form and pure gesture, where parts of the human body emerge or recede depending on the viewer’s focus.

The works on paper on the second floor reveal an earlier chapter of her life and practice: drawings over photographs and newspapers hinting at her childhood in East Germany, with motifs of helicopters, apartment blocks and a lonely child.

Moritz’s works are held in major institutional collections worldwide — the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. The Max Hetzler exhibition is a significant return for the artist, and according to Artnet News it precedes the solo presentation dedicated to her at the Garden Museum in London, which opens on Thursday, 8 October 2026.