Herbert Brandl *

(Graz 1959–2025 Vienna)
Untitled, signed and dated on the reverse Brandl 2023, archive no. HB23SAO, acrylic on canvas, 110 x 80 cm, on metal stretcher
Provenance:
Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna
Private Collection, Lower Austria

Herbert Brandl’s mountain paintings are ambiguous. In a manner akin to the fetishization of landscape in photography, they present the mountains as an isolated body, detached from any coherent spatial continuum and ultimately inaccessible. The mountain appears as an object of pure visual apprehension, one that resists any form of physical or experiential engagement with the viewer. Yet at the same time, these compositions are realized through a mode of painting with its own corporeality, which renders them tangible, almost like a wall.
Ulrich Loock, Die fernen Berge und Malerei wie eine Wand

Excerpt from:
Exhibition Catalogue, Herbert Brandl, Neue Galerie im Künstlerhaus Graz, 15 March – 25 March 2002,
Hatje Cantz (ed.) 2002.