Herbert Brandl (born 1959 in Graz, Austria) is one of the most influential painters of the moment. He took part in the renowned art event Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany, in 1992, and in 2007 he showed his art at the internationally prestigious Venice Biennale.

The landscape plays a dominant role in Brandl’s monumental works, although it is not always a landscape readily recognisable as such. Brandl’s paintings inhabit a space between figurative and abstract art. For Brandl, the essence of an artwork lies in the act of painting: in the materiality and colours of the paint. The familiar images and shapes that can be made out in Brandl’s work are not the artist’s actual subject. For instance, if the bottom of one of his works is prevailed over by dark shades, this might well result in a landscape, but that is never what the artist has been aiming at. Brandl paints in rough, loose movements that are large-scale tests. What results is an ongoing interplay between light, colour, and matter.