‘Even an ugly thistle can be so beautiful’: painter Sabine Moritz

The German artist’s first major UK institutional show, at London’s Garden Museum, includes works that span 30 years. Frieze London 2026 interview ‘Even an ugly thistle can be so beautiful’: painter Sabine Moritz on how nature informs her work The German artist’s first major UK institutional show, at London’s Garden Museum, includes works that span 30 years Dale Berning Sawa 16 October 2026 Share Cologne-based artist Sabine Moritz’s retrospective Lie Down in Green Pastures is at London’s Garden Museum When an interviewer in 2023 asked her about a new body of gestural paintings being somewhere between abstraction and figuration, she described the act of painting itself as a landscape of sorts. “It’s like there are two banks,” she said.

“Figuration on one side and abstraction on the other, and a river between. The river is obstinate. It takes time to cross.” This imagery draws out a golden thread that weaves through all her work, where ever-present attention is paid to the natural world.

As Moritz was preparing to open Lie Down in Green Pastures at the Garden Museum in London—her first large-scale museum show in the UK—she spoke about her early works, based on memories of her childhood, that brought her to the world’s attention and how her new work is not about understanding the past but how to live in the present. This is your first UK museum exhibition. How does that make you feel?

Sabine Moritz: I’m so proud and so happy to be doing this show, particularly in the Garden Museum, which has made clear all kinds of connections that I wasn’t really aware of until now. When the curator Emma House and I first discussed what to include, I sent over images and gave her free rein. She immediately knew she wanted the two big Institute paintings: Institute I and Institute II.

I had never shown them before because I was just never happy with them. I made them a long time ago back in 1993, while studying at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, and I knew exactly what I was trying to achieve with them then.

But somehow I always felt I could have done better. I was essentially trying to teach myself how to paint with oils.

I made the botanical drawings around the same time, which I’ve also never shown. I kind of only recently rediscovered them.

What has been amazing is seeing anew the works Emma chose—it makes me think there is a quality there that I hadn’t seen myself. Perhaps the sense of urgency or intensity I felt when making them and wanted to instil in them is discernible—even if, to my mind, they aren’t entirely successful in formal terms.

Moritz’s Institute I (1993). “I love the subversive nature of plants, the way they will always grow back, no matter how much you fight against them,” the artist says For a while I was working a lot on the idea of war—helicopters and airplanes are among the motifs I explored—none of which is included in the show.

But towards the end of that period, I came across these photos Robert Capa took while travelling through Ukraine, then a Soviet republic, in 1947 with John Steinbeck. He captured people in the fields during the harvest.

Because it’s both really beautiful, seeing people at work in nature, but you also know how hard these years were. There was famine; so many men didn’t come back from the war.

Among the figures was that photograph of a child, which I painted again and again. When I’m fascinated or busy with something, I tend to do many variations on it.

It is only later that I realised that that child is like an alter ego, or a second me—a figure that reminds me so much of my own childhood, or perhaps of something that all of us experienced as children. Being left to our own devices, running around outside making noise, in a state of Selbstvergessenheit —I don’t think there is a satisfactory English equivalent of this word.

Literally it translates as “self-forgetfulness”, but it isn’t about forgetfulness.