GALERIE PETER VANN
HERBERT BRANDL
IN THE MOUNTAIN LIGHT
Austrian painter Herbert Brandl is a prizewinning artist who has exhibited at the Biennale. Among the work that has made him famous are studies of mighty mountain ranges. He devotes immense vigour and energy to absorbing details of photographs from the Engadine mountains and interpreting them with his own expressive artistic forms as monotypes.
His selected starting points are the large-format photographs taken by the celebrated photographer Peter Vann, who tracks down these often hard-to-reach subjects with immense enthusiasm and presents the more sedentary among us with dramatic views possessing a thoroughly literary dimension – the Morteratsch, the Biancograt or the Albula Pass – captured in conditions in which a special light prevails and the air is crystal-clear.
That these two wanderers in the High Alps have found each other, and formed a two-man rope team to explore risk-areas where a sense of balance is essential, is an unusually fortunate turn of events.