Lot 16 | Herbert Brandl | Untitled

Landscape of Light and Colour

Austrian painter Herbert Brandl, whose spontaneous, expressive painting style made him one of the representatives of the Neue Wilden (New Wild) movement, has been dealing intensively with landscape and the phenomena occurring in it since the beginning of his artistic career in the 1980s. The diversity of rock formations or crystalline structures is a source of inspiration for Brandl's paintings, which always explore the fine line between figuration and abstraction.

In his turn to landscape painting, Brandl breaks with the tradition of this genre, as it were. For it is not the veduta, the reproduction of a view, that is in the foreground for Brandl. He is much more interested in the spatial realisation of these colour and light effects of natural origin in painting. He intuitively reduces found motifs, whether glaciers or waterfalls, to their essence and executes his mostly large-format works with great concentration, speed and without interruption.

Gestural Roar

In the painting presented here, movement dominates both on the level of the motif and on the level of the painting. Brandl's gestural style seems to arise from the immediate elementary experience as a necessary physical expression. With this dynamic painting technique, Brandl attempts to correspond to the elemental force of the waterfall with its roaring and foaming spray. He uses a dark palette to contour greenish glowing mountains and black rocks, setting them as calm islands in the picture, washed by the wild masses of water. The rushing cascades and the raging torrent, as an almost untamed river of brushstrokes shimmering between icy turquoise and clear white, are set against these static manifestations, which prove to be veritable anchor points of the composition. The interplay between still and moving sections and the contrast between light and dark allow the developed form and the free colour matter to coexist, the latter no longer subject to formal constraints. In this way, the natural phenomenon becomes a pretext for illustrating essential artistic questions.

Bettina Haiss