(born in Graz in 1959)
Untitled, on the reverse signed, dated Brandl 2004, oil on canvas, 150 x 190 cm, on metal stretcher

Provenance:
Private Collection, Vienna

You learn it as soon as you start at the Academy: no matter what’s depicted, vertical formats imply trees or figures. And horizontal formats are associated with landscapes. Every horizontal line is seen as a horizon. Unfortunately, that’s the case, and it’ll catch you out time and again. I always wanted to avoid landscapes – but, boom, that’s the horizon back again. Then I get annoyed and try to disrupt the horizon. You’re always trapped within the coordinate system of the human eye: up/down, left/right, front/back. I was recently in London’s National Gallery, where I saw a portrait of a scholar by Holbein: there was a distorted skull in the foreground that gave the image an unbelievable feeling of space. It gathered together so many dimensions, it was indescribable. There, the horizontal and the vertical are ruptured; an image becomes the painting. There, you forget all that landscape rubbish. I often don’t know what I’m doing in my own paintings. Nor do I know why I always end up depicting landscapes, why I keep omitting people from my paintings, why there has to be such loneliness there.
Herbert Brandl - from an interview withs Wolfgang Kos, in: Herbert Brandl, Neue Galerie Graz, 2002