Press release
HERBERT BRANDL
Into the Light
2.11.2024 – 20.07.2025
opening 2 November 2024
After the important exhibition in 2017, Giorgio Persano presents a new solo exhibition by Herbert Brandl on the first floor of Via Stampatori 4, Turin, continuing the more than 30-year collaboration with the Austrian artist. This new exhibition project revolves around large-format paintings from the latest of the painter’s production, who has always broken the norms and expectations of the Viennese academic tradition, becoming a significant protagonist of the international contemporary scene.
Through broad and free brushstrokes, Brandl captures fragments of landscape, whether these be broken profiles of mountains or fiery atmospheric phenomena, without being interested in a particular, recognisable subject, but representing nature as igniting form, colour, rhythm and structure.
A point of departure, and not of arrival, the mountain in particular is for the artist a form of natural abstraction that calls him to represent it in its majesty, exploring its complex relationship between distance and desire, between concreteness and conceptualisation: ‘Brandl thinks of things from their edges and is thus able to go beyond their supposed reference. (…) By causing conception and emotion to coincide, Brandl works on painting before art. There he produces images far from – internal or external – reality, but the images remain real.’ Sandro Droschl
In Brandl there is thus a deep immersion into the essence of nature and of time, while always preserving the centrality and autonomy of the artistic act. This claim not only emphasises the artist’s creative spontaneity, but also allows him to establish an authentic dialogue with the natural world.
Each canvas thus becomes a battle between order and chaos, between control and freedom, and – whether it be an evocation of an image ‘already stored as a sign in his memory’ (Florian Steininger) or pure abstraction of lines and colour – the energy of the gesture is unleashed, until it becomes the work’s only possible protagonist.
Artworks of exhibitions
