For a long time, Verena Loewensberg created art that was “abstracted” from a visual reality, yet “concrete”—in other words, made up of purely formal elements. The orthogonal grid motif, inherited from painters like Mondrian, underpins all of her paintings. Consisting of simple geometric figures and solid colours, the forms of her compositions have a life of their own. The geometric interweaving, which becomes complex in some areas, is based on formal elements like line and surface, figure and background, centre and border, as well as symmetry and asymmetry, stasis and movement.
In 1977, the artist declared: “I have no theory; I depend on something occurring to me”. Loewensberg kept her distance from the theoretical and ideological positions of concrete art. Since the 1960s, she had felt moved to look at what was happening outside of that movement. In her work, one can see the growing importance of music, and how the composition of the music of that time (jazz, bebop, bossa nova) can be linked to her work.
Though she mainly practiced painting, she created preliminary drawings with coloured pencil on graph paper. Her precise, structured compositions—without reliance on a specific technique—stemmed from a considerable formal and chromatic freedom, demonstrating how a colour never exists alone, but always in relation to others. Finally, near the end of her life, she worked serially, using identical motifs that she permutated in different compositions. Verena Loewensberg never gave any titles to her works, to avoid directing viewers, thus offering them the possibility of a total pictorial experience.
In 1977, the artist declared: “I have no theory; I depend on something occurring to me”. Loewensberg kept her distance from the theoretical and ideological positions of concrete art. Since the 1960s, she had felt moved to look at what was happening outside of that movement. In her work, one can see the growing importance of music, and how the composition of the music of that time (jazz, bebop, bossa nova) can be linked to her work.
Though she mainly practiced painting, she created preliminary drawings with coloured pencil on graph paper. Her precise, structured compositions—without reliance on a specific technique—stemmed from a considerable formal and chromatic freedom, demonstrating how a colour never exists alone, but always in relation to others. Finally, near the end of her life, she worked serially, using identical motifs that she permutated in different compositions. Verena Loewensberg never gave any titles to her works, to avoid directing viewers, thus offering them the possibility of a total pictorial experience.
