POLLY APFELBAUM, ISA MELSHEIMER

Particularly remarkable is the group of works that consists of newly created medium-format canvases, prefiguring a new and powerfully luminous imagery in the oeuvre of the sixty-year-old Herbert Brandl. Without any representational reference the vibrantly colourful works stand out visibly from earlier phases in his oeuvre, attesting to an analytical interest in finely colour gradients and textures. But these gestural and impastoed paintings, each completed in a single phase, also illustrate the dazzling speed and energy in Brandl’s work process as he lays out this frenzy of colour on the canvas surface with palette knife and spatula.

A further aspect of the exhibition focuses on the artist’s new sculptures. Here for the first time Brandl has chosen to transpose to the three-dimensional space the theme of the crystal, a theme he had previously visited exclusively in monotypes and oil paintings, but now showcasing two aluminium casts as a formally antagonistic duo. There is also an autobiographic aspect to his use of the crystal motif. Indeed, the templates for the digitally enlarged sculptures of the rock crystals come from Brandl’s own collection. But there is also a metaphorical interpretation to the monolithic appearance of the self-contained crystal formation. At this exhibition it can certainly be seen as a symbolic closure and completion of a phase of artistic work and as an energy-packed departure towards something new.

Text by Daniel Brezina. Courtesy Galerie Nächt St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder