Herbert Brandl - Untitled

Herbert Brandl

Untitled
2009

Oil on canvas. 218 x 170 cm. Signed and dated 'Brandl 09' verso on canvas.

„The painting is ultimately completey based on the antitheses, indeed violent conflict, between light and color. In Herbert Brandl, that struggle is in part between the white of the canvas and the bright colors and in part between the white and colored paints on the same canvas […]. In Brandl's paintings of the first decade of the twenty-first century, this conflict multiplies the intensity of both opponents - color and of light - and lends them a fresh energy, which gets by without artificial applications of paint or spectacular contrasts. As soon as the eye has adjusted to these planes of color and light, it becomes equally evident that their formal language walks a thin tightropenon which abstract, spontaneously drawn lines and connections between planes sometimes appear to be the subject matter of the painting, before a thoroughly figurative approach, characterized only to dissolve again into the experience of the nonobjective image. The eye thinks it perceives something like a surface with grass growing on it, or algae moving underwater […] All of this is achieved without effects and with a naturalness that accounts for the high quality of Brandl's oeuvre, especially in the current decade.“ (Robert Fleck, Herbert Brandl, A central position in painting, in: Herbert Brandl, exhib.cat. Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 2009, p.77)

Provenance

Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt (2009); Private collection, North Germany

Exhibitions

Wien 2020 (Belvedere 21), Herbert Brandl, Exposed to Painting, Die letzten zwanzig Jahre, exhib.cat., p.140 with colour ill.
Emden 2012 (Kunsthalle), Herbert Brandl, Landschaften, Monotypien und Gemälde, exhib.cat., n.p. with colour ill.