Herbert Brandl - Buy or sell works
Graz 1959
Herbert Brandl is among the best-known contemporary Austrian artists and is considered a proponent of the New Wild.
Brandl was born in Graz in 1959. He attended the University of Fine Arts Vienna, where he studied under Herbert Tasquil and Peter Weibel. He held a visiting professorship in Vienna from 1985–1991, and was appointed professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 2004. He currently lives and works in Vienna.
Producing explosively colourful and gestural paintings, the young Brandl belonged to the New Wild generation at the start of his artistic career.
Brandl has risen to prominence with major exhibitions since the 1980s. He presented his work at the Paris Biennale in 1985, at the 1990 Documenta IX in Kassel, and at Kunsthalle Basel in 1992. He represented Austria at the Venice Biennale in 2007. The Albertina in Vienna honoured him with a 2011 exhibition, entitled ‘Herbert Brandl. Mountains and Landscapes. Monotypes 2009–2010”.
In his art, Brandl portrays himself as a wanderer who stops to absorb details or stories, as well as shapes, colours and light. The themes he addresses include traumatic situations in life, such as accidents or death. Observers may not necessarily recognise these references in his pieces on nature, flowers and landscapes, although he sees them as a critical processing of troublesome events (compare interview with Brandl, Albertina Catalogue, 2010).
Brandl’s work, especially from 2000 onward, documents his fascination with landscape and the monumentality of the mountain world, evidencing a completely new interpretation of motifs that have otherwise drifted into the realm of kitsch: Brandl uses a variety of formats and techniques to capture the mountain motif, playing with expressive gestures, colour spaces and shaped structures that dismantle the familiar world around us.
Pieces by Brandl have repeatedly been highlights of the Austrian offerings in Dorotheum’s auctions and are frequently achieve excellent prices.