Biography

Born in Strasbourg to an architect father, painter Verena von Lichtenberg began drawing perspectives, elevations, floor plans and architectural structures from an early age. She grew up in Germany, where she won several drawing and painting competitions. Her childhood environment was shaped by the influence of architects and artists such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Otto Wagner, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí, whose work would leave a lasting imprint on her artistic development.

She was also influenced by the architectural exchanges and professional work of her father and one of his colleagues, a close friend of Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer. This proximity to a modernist architectural environment contributed at an early stage to the formation of her perception of space and visual structure.

Her art teachers encouraged her to pursue an artistic career, but her family opposed this path.

She therefore embarked on technical studies in architectural drafting, becoming a laureate of the State of Hesse (Land Hessen). She graduated with distinction and the congratulations of the examination board thanks to innovative presentations combining technical drawing, perspective and visual creativity.

Required to follow a technical curriculum, she negotiated her admission to the Technical School of Darmstadt, which also hosted the Academy of Fine Arts. There she simultaneously pursued scientific studies, architecture and graphic design, disciplines that would permanently influence her understanding of space, composition and light.

Throughout her academic and professional career, she continued to develop her personal artistic research independently.

She subsequently studied engineering and urban design at the Technical University of Darmstadt and later at the École Supérieure des Travaux Publics (ESTP) in Paris.

Her professional career was marked by positions in architectural and urban development, where she worked alongside internationally renowned architects and urban planners including Frank Owen Gehry, Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel, Rem Koolhaas and Roland Castro.

During her exhibition at the François Pompon Museum in Saulieu in 2016, she became more consciously aware of the profound influence of the Bauhaus on her visual perception and conception of space, revealing a continuity between her early technical education and the principles of modernist architecture.

This path, at the crossroads of architecture, engineering and visual arts, forms the foundation of her artistic practice, in which space, structure and light progressively become autonomous materials of expression.