Verena Loewensberg

Hauser & Wirth (London), Feb/25-Apr/25

In 1930, in the first and only edition of the magazine Art Concret, Theo van Doesburg published the Manifesto of Concrete Art, which advocated art’s liberation from the need to depict natural objects or emotions. After van Doesburg’s death the following year, the idea of Concrete Art was developed by Swiss artist Max Bill, who organised the first international exhibition of concrete art works in Basel in 1944. According to Bill, the aim of Concrete Art was to create ‘in a visible and tangible form things which did not previously exist – to represent abstract thoughts in a sensuous and tangible form’.

Verena Loewensberg (1912-1986) was one of the most influential figures of the Zurich school of concrete artists, whose work evolved from these principles. The current exhibition of her work at Hauser & Wirth in London presents paintings from the 1960s to the 1980s in which Loewensberg disrupts some elements of the rigid norms of concrete art. She paints freehand, resisting precision and control, instead pursuing a more sensual engagement with painting, moving beyond the movement’s ostensibly rational and austere foundations.

Her sense of playfulness and tactility is reflected in the exhibition’s display, which brings together her paintings, her only sculpture, and a large wallpapered wall, based on a pattern she designed early in her career, reminding us that she, and many of her generation of artists, were also involved in the applied arts. The wallpaper gives the viewer a good idea of how this form could be visualised outside the original small drawing from which it is derived.

Her paintings are presented in groups of two or three, suggesting thematic variations on the same formal composition, exploring rhythm, geometry, and colour. Her work creates tensions and harmonies, juxtaposing primary with complementary colours to increase contrast. Loewensberg was a lover of jazz music and managed a record shop where she sold modern and free jazz, and the suggestive links between the chromatic flair of the aural and the visual are clear to see in her work.

Formally restrained, her works are reduced to a limited palette and linear structure. The colour is flat, devoid of visual depth, where tension occurs in the act of seeing. On one wall of the exhibition, three large paintings recall a deconstructed version of Mondrian (a friend and collaborator of van Doesburg): each canvas is painted with a primary colour, using only two-tones, which demonstrate her use of closely related hues to produce near-monochromatic compositions.

Loewensberg’s works have no titles. She deliberately refused to explain them, resisting interpretations that might confine her practice. This refusal was a strategy to evade the narrow categorisation of her work within an art world that systematically marginalised female artists. It granted her the intellectual freedom to experiment, moving beyond Concrete Art towards Conceptual Art and Colour Field painting.

Those ideas took root far beyond their European origins. Brazil may be far away from Switzerland, but both countries have found in Concrete Art a visual language that speaks to their own modern realities. It is just a short walk down the road from Hauser & Wirth to the Royal Academy, where the exhibition Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism confirms this shared experience.

Ana Teles for London Art Walk
March 2025