Without resorting to conventional exhibiting methods of recent works and through the selection of various pieces from his latest stages, the Heinrich Erhardt Gallery presents the fourth individual exhibition of the Austrian painter Herbert Brandl (Graz, 1959). Our exhibition is configured as a short retrospective and offers a way to interpret Brandl’s last fifteen years’ painting strategies. The paintings date back to 1995, 1999, 2006 and 2010, and they represent a thorough view on the most basic and recurrent issues in his production: lights, shadows, landscapes, distance, time, or the insight into the realm of nature and imagination hiding in his preferably abstract compositions reveal the shape and the depth of his art. Brandl’s various, sometimes paradoxical, coat-like approaches reach out towards a pictorial process by which coating and provision, grains and streaks convey a peculiar manner to distill and decant the picture, to measure its rhythms and tempoes and hence discover the inner labyrinth of a taken away glance trapped in the shuttling and shifting of an unstoppable pictorial burst.

During a conversation between Herbert Brandl and Hans Ulrich Obrist in the year 2002 on the distribution of his works in an exhibition hall, the painter claimed that “the viewer moves among the paintings as if they were paths between front and back stage, like in a walkable landscape”. This is exactly the reason for choosing today’s selection: a travel between scenery and drama. Huge canvases fill the space to build a new moving landscape, one that can be walked in; Brandl’s paintings convey the idea of a traveller shifting from visible to perceivable.