Verena Landau, born 1965 in Düsseldorf, lives and works in Leipzig. From 1990 to 1993 she studied and taught historical painting technique and portrait painting at Charles Cecil Studios, Florence, Italy. From 1994 to 1999 she studied painting/graphics at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts with Arno Rink, Neo Rauch and Wolfram Ebersbach. In 2003 she received a scholarship from the Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Hessen-Thüringen. Since 2002 she has been artistic director of intercultural exchange projects for women and girls as well as advanced training for professionals from the social sector in France, Israel, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Romania and Poland.
From 2008 she has been working as a lecturer at the Institute for Art Education at the University of Leipzig. Since 2015, she has been leading summer courses at the Bad Reichenhall Art Academy. In 2017, she conducted advanced trainings at the International Art Master Classes, Beijing Universal Music & Culture Development Co. Ltd. in China (Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzou).
Her works have been shown at the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin, Museum Królikarnia-Palais Warsaw (Poland), Galerie Arsenal, Poznań (Poland), Muzeul National de Artă Timişoara (Romania) and School of Visual Arts, New York, among others.
"In the conception of my works I usually start from the exhibition space and construct my designs collage-like from setpieces of my own or found photos or film stills. In the painterly translation, I examine the photographic models for their content: in the process of painting, the subject-object relationships of the figures and objects or the relationship to the space surrounding them change. Sometimes I discover other levels of meaning of the scenes through the painting process - irritations arise that cannot be planned. It comes to resolution, figures and spaces interpenetrate."
