(born in Graz in 1959)
Untitled/Waterfall, on the reverse signed, dated Brandl 1992, oil on canvas, 150 x 130 cm, on stretcher

Full-page colour illustration:
Herbert Brandl, Neue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz 2002, p. 182, listed p. 164

Provenance:
Jack Tilton Gallery, NY - label on the reverse
Private Collection, Vienna

... Brandl’s painting is not designed to be the equivalent of landscape, as its concentration, idealisation, or metaphor, but as its remnant: it does not aim to “make the invisible visible”, but instead to present the unrepresentability (of landscape) in the body of (landscape) painting, to establish the presence of the physicality of painting out of the unrepresentability of landscape. The emergence of painting out of the image of landscape, the negation of the representation is shown as a necessity present in the thing itself, far removed from stylisation, in which for example the mannerism of someone like Baselitz becomes entangled. Also far removed from the universal claim of historical abstract painting.

... Yet the waterfalls nonetheless lay stress on a particular aspect of the physicality of painting, the running and the flowing of the paint, the sagging of the wet paint material under the influence of gravity, its sliding off the surface of the canvas, which remains up to a certain extent beyond the control of the artist.
The self-representation of painting is multifaceted. Even more than that of the representation of the desirable body, we recognise the trace of desire in the self-representation of painting, the multiple differentiation of painting from itself: the unity of painting, divided into the body and its representation, as unattained object of desire.
Ulrich Look – from the aforementioned literature