Verena Loewensberg

Verena Loewensberg was born on 28 May 1912 in Zurich, Switzerland. She did not follow a conventional art-school path. From 1927 to 1929 she studied weaving, embroidery, design, and color theory at the Gewerbeschule Basel, leaving before completing the program. She then apprenticed with the weaver Martha Guggenbuhl in Speicher, in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden, starting in 1929, and around 1930 to 1932 trained in modern dance and choreography at Trudi Schoop's school in Zurich.

In the mid-1930s she traveled repeatedly to Paris, often with Max Bill, and met artists associated with the Abstraction-Creation group, including Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Theo van Doesburg, and Georges Vantongerloo. In 1935 she briefly enrolled at the Academie Moderne in Paris but left, dissatisfied with what she saw as an overly academic approach. By her own account, 1936 marked the true start of her mature practice.

Loewensberg spent her working life in Zurich as part of the city's concrete art circle, producing paintings built from grids and planes of flat color. Recognition came late: her first major retrospective was mounted at Kunsthaus Zurich in 1981, when she was 69 and it was reportedly the museum's first exhibition devoted to a woman artist. She died in Zurich on 27 April 1986.

Loewensberg's reputation rests on her position as the sole woman among the core Zurich Concrete artists and on the rigor of her grid-based color compositions. Institutional recognition arrived late in her life and accelerated after her death: the 1981 Kunsthaus Zurich retrospective, a 1992 survey at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, and a 2012 retrospective at Kunst Museum Winterthur each expanded scholarly attention, while the 2022 MAMCO Geneva retrospective and the 2024 to 2025 Hauser & Wirth exhibition in New York have reframed her as a central rather than peripheral figure in Swiss concrete art. She herself dated the start of her mature concrete practice to 1936.

Documented auction results for Loewensberg are modest and thinly traded. The best-documented result is CHF 39,582 for Ohne Titel, 1971, at BBW Auktionen in St. Gallen on 3 November 2023. A more recent, independently confirmed sale brought CHF 22,500, including buyer's premium, for a separate Ohne Titel at Koller Auktionen in Zurich on 26 June 2025. Lempertz's own artist price archive separately lists a work at EUR 75,000, but that figure has no confirmed sale date or city and no independent confirmation that it reflects a completed auction sale, so it is treated here as unverified rather than as her auction high. Her market has historically traded at a fraction of prices paid for male Zurich Concrete peers such as Max Bill, a gap that recent institutional attention, including the 2022 MAMCO retrospective and the 2024 to 2025 Hauser & Wirth exhibition in New York, appears aimed at closing.

Loewensberg's auction history is thin, with relatively few tracked sales and no confirmed catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification through her current galleries, Hauser & Wirth and The Mayor Gallery, matter more than usual. Prices to date have been modest compared with her male Zurich Concrete contemporaries, and the recent run of institutional attention, including a 2022 museum retrospective and a 2024 to 2025 gallery survey, is the clearest signal that her market position may still be catching up to her art-historical standing. Collectors should treat any single auction result with caution given how few comparable sales exist, and should note that the highest publicly cited figure for her work (EUR 75,000, via Lempertz) has not been confirmed as a completed sale.