HERBERT BRANDL

February 22-April 12, 2003

Herbert Brandl was born in 1959 at Graz, Austria. He studied in Vienna at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst. He lives and works in Vienna.

The work of Herbert Brandl has been recognized by numerous international institutions. Brandl’s paintings resist straightforward perception and analysis. They waver between representation and abstraction. Although his art seemingly refers to landscape, his paintings resist the experience taken from nature and transformed onto the canvas and resort to self-referential and abstract. Brandl’s works have always been particularly free from historic artistic influences; they developed out of nothing but the painter’s reactions to the canvas that he sees emerging.

The work of Herbert Brandl is essentially expressionistic, based on a spontaneous mode of painting made out of emotions and with no preconceived justifications or rules. What characterizes his paintings is their infinite, visionary and non-optical space, their unusual colour combinations and their opposition between the flat surface and patches of colour, creating an imaginary depth.

The artists says that he always acts spontaneously. He paints on very large canvases because for him the size plays an important role and can be varied infinitely. For Brandl, size among other things reflects sheer possibility. He enjoys using the largest possible format that the canvas industry is able to supply.

The last two years Herbert Brandl paints images of mountains from pictures in glossy catalogues or mountaineering magazines. He paints the largest, hugest mountains in the world. Some of the paintings are in an immensely large format, with the image gigantically enlarged. All of these works are Untitled; the artist is not interested in the name of the mountain but more in the essence of its form and the way that he is able to capture it.