Herbert Brandl
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Biography
Herbert Brandl, born in Graz in 1959, studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna under Herbert Tasquil and Peter Weibel. Together with Siegfried Anzinger, Alois Mosbacher, Hubert Scheibl and Hubert Schmalix, he is one of the most important Austrian representatives of the ‘Neue Wilde’. From 1985 to 1991, he held a visiting professorship at his alma mater in Vienna. From 2004 to 2019 he was a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. From the mid-1980s, the artist took part in major international exhibitions. These included the Biennale de Paris in 1985, the Musée d'Art de la Ville de Paris in 1990, documenta IX in Kassel in 1992 and the exhibition ‘Painting on the Move’ at the Kunsthalle Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst in 2002. In 2007, he represented the Austrian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia. In 2020, the Belvedere 21 in Vienna hosted the major retrospective ‘Herbert Brandl. Exposed to Painting. The last twenty years’ took place.
The artist lives and works in Vienna.
With his large-format pictorial compositions, Herbert Brandl is one of the most successful Austrian painters of the present day. The subject of landscape has played a dominant role in his work from the very beginning, alternating between painterly abstraction and representationalism, playing with expressive gestures, abstract colour spaces and powerful formal structures. His painting style is quick, spontaneous and intuitive, but each picture has a ‘strong framework... it's a mixture of total preparation, which is then dropped to become something uncontrolled. At a certain point I decide completely intuitively, without thinking... the moment when you completely abandon the idea you've built up, that's the most exciting thing"¹.
¹Artist talk: Herbert Brandl in conversation with Ines Mitterer on the occasion of the exhibition at Belvedere 21, Vienna 2019, at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjUdg0zogoU (accessed on 22 January 2022)
