VERENA LOEWENS: KIND OF BLUE
Hauser & Wirth presents Kind of Blue, the first solo exhibition dedicated to Verena Loewensberg. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery’s 69th Street in New York.
February 21 – April 27, 2024
Born in 1912, Swiss artist Verena Loewensberg was a leading figure of the influential Zurich school of concrete artists. The only female member of the group, which also included Max Bill, Camille Graeser and Richard Paul Lohse, Loewensberg distinguished herself through her oeuvre’s formal and chromatic flair. In her work, structured oil compositions are animated by wide-ranging color and shape, yielding a precise yet poetic art.
After briefly studying at the Académie Moderne in Paris in 1935, Loewensberg ultimately abandoned her formal academic training. Back in Zurich, she started painting on paper and paperboard and in 1936 was one of the few women who took part in the groundbreaking exhibition ‘Zeitprobleme in der Schweizer Malerei und Plastik’ (Time Problems in Swiss Painting and Sculpture) at the Kunsthaus Zurich.
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. The unexpected liveliness with which she treated the motif of the grid, for instance, is apparent in a painting from 1950 on view in the exhibition: here she has created a compositional system that fragments and perturbs the grid, separating and layering rectangular blocks of color, both in primary pigments and greens and purples reminiscent of Vantongerloo’s palette. Loewensberg spread the grid out across her canvas like a composer would with sheets of music, arranging color and shape as extemporized notes that not only relate to but also define one another.
As her daughter, Henriette Coray Loewensberg, recalls, ‘When I picture my mother, I see her painting at her worktable. She was very passionate about her work, to which she devoted great discipline and constancy. Books and music nourished her creative drive. We often had visitors at home, and my mother had inspiring conversations with them, mostly about music, literature, philosophy and astronomy.’
In the ensuing decades, her work focused more on formal elements and series of works that broke from the strictures of concrete art. Moving closer to the ideas of color field, hard-edge and minimalism, many of her paintings took on an atmospheric quality, an effect that she called ‘Stimmung,’ which refers to their overall tone or mood. On view on the first floor is a series of deceptively simple two-toned paintings from the 1970s and 1980s in which she used closely related colors to render monochromatic figures from a series of overlapping squares.
In 1980, at the age of 68, Loewensberg traveled to Sicily to visit the Greek temples, a journey that led not only to the production of a new series of paintings, but also the creation, in 1982, of the only sculpture she would ever make. This untitled sculpture is comprised of five pairs of parallelepipeds constructed out of wood. With its architectural composition and symmetry evoking the formal elements of ancient Greek temples, the work is one of the very few by Loewensberg that allude to existing structures.