Herbert Brandl - Set

This year's stamp from the “Modern art in Austria” series shows a work by the Austrian artist Herbert Brandt, who is regarded as one of the main proponents of the “New Wild Ones”.

Herbert Brandl was born in Graz in 1959 and studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna under professors Herbert Tasquil and Peter Weibel from 1978 until 1982. Brandl taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf until 2019, but now lives and works in Vienna.

Landscapes play an important part in Brandt's mostly large-scale works, especially the monumental world of the mountains. His work vacillates between abstraction and objectivism. Large patches of light and dark colors create the impression of fields of snow or crags, whilst the line where these fields of color meet is like a ridge. Brush strokes and trickles of paint are clearly visible in the paintings, with the dynamic artistic process being documented through erasure and overpainting. The artist creates his paintings from photographic templates using a reduced color palette comprising mainly shades of blue, white and black. Meter-high canvases laid on their sides are painted in one continuous act, a physical challenge that is reminiscent of “conquering” peaks in mountaineering. The design shown on the stamp, Untitled,