VERENA LOEWENSBERG
Hauser & Wirth presents the first solo gallery exhibition in the UK dedicated to the singular 20th-century figure, Verena Loewensberg (1912 – 1986), featuring striking paintings from the 1960s to 1980s in which she broke from the strictures of concrete art.
February 25 – April 17, 2025
The exhibition opens with a wallpapered section of wall, which not only provides a backdrop to present Loewensberg’s paintings upon but also offers a glimpse into the artist’s early career. In 1927, Loewensberg began studying weaving, embroidery, design and color theory and, like Sonia Delaunay and Sophie TaeuberArp, she worked in applied arts and design throughout her career, firmly believing in the application of geometric abstraction to everyday life. An example of one of her designs is reproduced as a wallpaper and is complemented by an oil on canvas from 1957. With this painting, Loewensberg achieved a sense of movement and energy both through her striking palette of primary colors and more and by fragmenting the grid—a structuring system she would often play with. This anticipates the unrestrained use of shape, patterning and color prevalent in her work from the 1960s.
Concrete art dominated the art scene in Switzerland, yet the works on view demonstrate Loewensberg’s deep engagement with contemporaneous international movements such as color field, hard-edge and minimalism. Paintings from 1967 reveal Loewensberg’s technical mastery of freehand painting. Working from preparatory sketches and transferring the final design to the canvas with light construction lines, Loewensberg’s liberated free-hand approach became a vehicle for self-expression. These works also reveal the artist’s ability to champion the color white, taking neutral tones from their role as a base and bringing them to the fore to produce circular shapes in the middle of these compositions.
Although the concretists were of great personal and professional importance to the artist, she attained a distinctly creative independence, stating in 1977 that, ‘It was as if I were a bird that had to learn to fly by itself.’ In the ensuing decades, her paintings took on an atmospheric quality, an effect that she called ‘Stimmung,’ which refers to their overall tone or mood. The exhibition includes a selection of deceptively simple twotoned paintings from the 1970s and 1980s in which she used closely related colors to render monochromatic compositions.
As with the sculpture on view, each of Loewensberg’s works are untitled, mirroring her relative silence on her work and private life. She produced no theoretical writings, and her preparatory sketches never reached the eye of the public. This reticence was perhaps intended to avoid the essentialisation of her work, particularly by a global and local art world that systematically marginalized female artists. By largely abstracting her artistic intentions and her personal life, Loewensberg invited free interpretation of her art and its capacities.