Sabine Moritz-Richter

Sabine Moritz was born in 1969 in Quedlinburg, in what was then East Germany. She studied painting at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung Offenbach from 1989 to 1991, in the class of Adam Jankowski, then continued at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf from 1991, first under Markus Lupertz and, from 1992, under Gerhard Richter. She is described as one of the last students Richter accepted into his class before he stopped teaching; a single source states she graduated from the academy in 1994.

Moritz married Gerhard Richter; sources place the marriage in 1995. She lives and works in Cologne. Her early work, largely drawing-based, drew on personal and collective memory, rendering house facades, flowers, and at times military imagery in a spare figurative idiom rooted in her childhood in the former East Germany. From around 2015 she began developing a parallel body of abstract paintings, which were first shown alongside her figurative work in the 2016 exhibition Dust at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris. Her practice since has moved between both modes.

Writers on Moritz's work have consistently framed it around memory and the coexistence of figuration and abstraction rather than around a single named movement. Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has described her paintings and drawings as engaging with the fleeting, remembered image, treating recollection as raw material for the work. Critic Robert Fleck, in a 2019 essay published by Galerie Marian Goodman, described her abstract paintings as operating in dialogue with her figurative ones, two related but independent bodies of work built from the same overlapping, layered process. No verified verbatim assessment of her work from a general-interest critical outlet was located; the commentary above is drawn from texts published by her representing galleries.

Moritz's auction market is small relative to the scale of her institutional recognition, but it has strengthened notably in the past decade. Her current auction record is Laguna I (2020), which sold for USD 279,400 at Sotheby's New York on 16 May 2025, more than tripling her previous record of USD 80,000, set by Aurora I (2006) at Sotheby's London on 11 February 2015. Collectors should keep her market distinct from that of her husband, Gerhard Richter, whose own auction results are far larger and have no bearing on Moritz's auction history.

Moritz's auction history remains thin, with relatively few public sales and, until 2025, no result above the low six figures, so any single sale can move her price record substantially, as the 2025 Laguna I result demonstrates. No catalogue raisonne has been identified for her work, which means provenance and verification through her galleries, Marian Goodman Gallery and Pilar Corrias, carry extra weight. Her museum presence, reported to include Tate, the LVMH Collection, and the Deutsche Bank Collection, points to institutional interest, though not every holding could be independently corroborated, and collectors should treat her market as early-stage and not yet deeply tested at auction.