Verena Loewensberg

25 February – 17 April 2025

Within the influential Zurich school of concrete artists, Swiss artist Verena Loewensberg (1912 – 1986) is notable for being a leading figure, as well as the only female member, of the group, which also included Max Bill, Camille Graeser and Richard Paul Lohse. Hauser & Wirth London presents the first solo exhibition in the UK dedicated to this singular 20th-Century figure, focusing on her later shift to ideas of color field, hard-edge and minimalism.

Starting with a work from the 1950s, presented on a wallpapered wall based on a design by the artist, the show features paintings from the 1960s to 1980s in which Loewensberg broke from the strictures of concrete art, distinguishing herself through her formal and chromatic flair, alongside the only sculptural work Loewensberg ever made.

The exhibition is organized with Henriette Coray Loewensberg, president of the Verena Loewensberg Foundation, with the support of Lionel Bovier, vice president of the Foundation and director of MAMCO in Geneva, Switzerland.

Verena Loewensberg (1912 – 1986) was born and lived in Zurich, Switzerland. She received a unique and non-linear education which started at the Gewerbeschule Basel in textile, design and color theory. She left the school in 1929 and continued training with the weaver Martha Guggenbühl, while also starting dance training in Zurich with Trudi Schoop. She took various roles and commissions in the applied arts and learned to paint from a textbook she found in Ascona. Loewensberg became acquainted with artists Max Bill and Binia Bill in 1934, whom she accompanied to Paris several times between 1935 and 1936. There, she was introduced by Bill to the Paris-based abstraction-création group, meeting Georges Vantongerloo, who would have a lasting impact on her work. Loewensberg began artmaking in 1936, exhibiting her work for the first time later that same year with abstraction-création at the Kunsthaus Zurich.