With his large-format imagery, Herbert Brandl ranks alongside the most successful contemporary painters in Austria. Landscape as a subject has always been dominant in his work, which alternates between painterly abstraction and objectivity. Since the turn of the new millennium, Brandl’s passion for the monumentality of mountainscapes has become increasingly apparent. Using various formats and techniques, the painter has reinterpreted the subject of mountains, playing with expressive gestures, abstract color spaces, and massive shapes. From late January 2020 the Belvedere 21 will be presenting an exhibition of Brandl’s oeuvre that focuses on work produced over the past two decades, including pieces that the artist has created especially for this exhibition.
Herbert Brandl was born in Graz in 1959. He attended the University of Applied Arts Vienna under Herbert Tasquil and Peter Weibel. The artist is known internationally thanks to his participation in major exhibitions like documenta IX in Kassel in 1992 and the Venice Biennale in 2007. Brandl was a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2004 to 2019. He lives and works in Vienna.