Herbert Brandl: Beyond Reality

The neo-expressionist painter, Herbert Brandl stands for canvases of overwhelming colour and form. The artist, who passed away in July 2025, is considered one of the most successful Austrian representatives of contemporary art.

Intense colours applied in sweeping brushstrokes: Herbert Brandl’s (1959–2025) atmospheric colour fields oscillate between abstraction and representation, with the very process of painting developing its own momentum and turning inwards to reference itself. The artist, who died earlier this year at the age of 66, described his engagement with nature – his capturing of mood and light – as an “inner process”.

For more than four decades, Brandl, who was born in Graz in 1959, pursued this process in virtuosic variations, undeterred by the shifting fashions of the art world. First acclaimed in the 1980s as one of the Neue Wilde for his gestural, colour-saturated canvases, he went on to become one of Austria’s most important contemporary artists, represented in collections across Europe.

Trained by Herbert Tasquil and Peter Weibel at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Brandl participated in documenta IX in 1993 and represented Austria at the Venice Biennale in 2007. His work has also been shown at Kunsthalle Basel, the Albertina and the Biennale de Paris. In 2020, the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere devoted a major retrospective to him.

Particular attention deserves Brandl’s ostensibly figurative depictions of nature. His mountains, mountain ranges and streams, he explained, are “not really real landscapes. Nor are they ideal landscapes,” but rather “landscapes of colour flowing out from the brush.” The canvases become “stage sets for my fantasies,” he once mused. Those fantasies also extended into darker realms of death and pain. In Brandl’s typically large-scale works, emotional weight and density pulse alongside a vivid, almost electric vitality – contradictions at the very heart of his art.