On August 29, the Friends of the GfZK visited the artist Verena Landau in her studio in the Westwerk. She invited us to an aperitif and a discussion about her art.
“I often encountered the dogma of the incompatibility of painting and conceptual or critical art practice. I am interested in working on these contradictions by bringing together visual worlds that don’t fit together, but which have to be thought of together. This is something that painting is particularly good at. I’m interested in the ambiguous and the non-simultaneous, a reconciliation of inner and outer pictorial worlds that only leaves traces of this kind in the medium of painting,” says Verena Landau.
About the artist:
Verena Landau, born 1965 in Düsseldorf, lives and works in Leipzig.
From 1990-1993 she studied and taught historical painting technique and portrait painting at the Charles Cecil Studios, Florence. From 1994 to 1999, she studied painting/graphics at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig under Arno Rink, Neo Rauch and Wolfram Ebersbach. In 2003, she received a scholarship from the Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Hessen-Thüringen. Since 2002, she has been the artistic director of intercultural exchange projects for women and girls as well as training courses for professionals from the social sector in France, Israel, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Romania and Poland. Since 2008 she has been working as an artistic assistant at the Institute for Art Education at Leipzig University. She is a co-founder and member of the MalerinnenNetzWerk Berlin-Leipzig. She has led summer courses at the Bad Reichenhall Art Academy since 2015. In 2017, she conducted further training as part of the international art master classes, Beijing Universal Music & CulturDevelopment Co. Ltd. in China (Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzou).
Her works have been shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig, the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Leipzig, the German Historical Museum Berlin, the Museum Krolikarnia-Palais Warsaw (Poland), Galerie Arsenal, Poznan (Poland), the Muzeul de Artă, Timisoara (Romania), the School of Visual Arts, New York and the Goethe Institute Hong Kong, among others.