Sabine Moritz

Lobeda Sabine Moritz

In Lobeda, the artist's book from 2010, Sabine Moritz remembers her childhood in a prefab housing estate near Jena in 95 pencil drawings.

The Neulobeda district is a densely populated area characterised by high-rise concrete buildings and modernist urban planning. This urban landscape was to have a profound effect on the young Moritz, which would later manifest itself in her work. While studying at the Offenbach University of Art and Design, Moritz began drawing her memories of Lobeda. The first body of her drawings from the early 1990s is published here.

The pencil drawings show a gentle sense of detachment matched by an unrelenting formal curiosity into qualities such as line, shape, form, perspective and space. Moritz captures a harmonious balance of geometric shapes with an emphasis on functionality that echoes a bygone era through intimate reminiscences of her past.

Viewed from above, as though looking down from the hills surrounding the town, Moritz sketches the bus stations, tramways and high-rise blocks of Lobeda. Details are included of windows, balconies and entranceways overlooking roads and pavements meandering between them. Inside, communal stairwells with winding banisters lead to private living spaces furnished with chairs, beds, table lamps and coat pegs that are etched in the artist's memory.