Helicopter

German artist Sabine Moritz, wife of Gerhard Richter, has worked with the theme of memory as a complex, changing, dynamic process in her paintings and drawings since the early 1990s, capturing remembered images from her childhood in East Germany, motifs related to war and destruction, and even flower compositions. Helicopter presents a brilliant collection of her most recent work: drawings and paintings of helicopters created between 2002 and 2013.

The series emerged from Moritz’s interest in a shift she detected in the symbolic meaning of helicopters over time, and it is built around images of helicopters from newspapers and TV that Moritz then recreated in her own visual language. The result is a series of surprisingly beautiful drawings and paintings that range from relatively straightforward, objective depictions of helicopters to more poetic, less representational compositions. The book is brilliantly rounded out by poems by Adam Zagajewski and Friedrich Hölderlin and an essay by art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist.