(born 1959 in Graz) Untitled, signed and dated Brandl 09 on the reverse, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm, stretched over a metal frame, (K)

Provenance: Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Innsbruck (adhesive label on the reverse) Private property, Vienna ... In his painting Brandl is not turning away from the goal of a sublime abstract discourse. Instead he is trying to create the necessary space for a style of painting which is neither sentimental nor cynical. No limitation is placed on the self in his work. Where a philosophical description can be inserted, here emptiness is permitted to spread. For the artist it is important to draw back from clear-cut determinations as far as possible, which places him on the periphery of late modernity, to some extent in direct contact with those excessively affirmative abstractions in which a painter like Polke always forces ever more new aspects. According to Brandl, painting is a form of nihilism, an “un-creation”, which strives to measure up to the „free spirit“....In this space the artist can work unhindered. There is no longer any need to plausibly propagate the myth of „great painting“ for the modernists appropriated that myth for themselves long ago. Tedium and degenerate stimuli no longer have any place in painting. (It was cynicism that dug the grave for the dominant discourses of modernism.) David A. Moos from: Herbert Brandl, Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna 1999