Verena Loewensberg: Prints

Verena Loewensberg: Prints

The Zurich painter Verena Loewensberg (1912-1986) belonged to the core group of Swiss Concrete artists that included Max Bill, Camille Graeser and Richard Paul Lohse, artists spurred by the precedents of Malevich and Mondrian to produce entirely "self-sufficient" works of art. "We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their own innate means and laws," Max Bill wrote--"without borrowing from natural phenomena." Active from the movement's inception in 1936, Loewensberg produced woodcuts, linocuts and silkscreens in which stripes and cubes of color combine to generate highly kinetic arrangements, and which are now rated as the most splendid examples of Concrete graphics. Loewensberg's take on Concrete art was somewhat more fluid than that of (for example) Max Bill, admitting of curvature and warmth while still aspiring to its intellectual rigor. This collection of Loewensberg's printworks introduces American audiences to a much-neglected chapter in abstraction.