A painter, printmaker and architect, Herbert Brandl was born in Graz, Austria, in 1959 and began to study at the Academy for the Decorative and Applied Arts under Herbert Tasquil and Peter Weibel in 1978. In 1980, while still unknown, Brandl was award the Styrian Förderungspreis for Art and held his first one-man show in 1984 at the 'Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum' in Graz. While still young, Brandl produced oil paintings in large formats, usually as diptychs and triptychs. Herbert Brandl's abstract landscapes, still lifes and later his female nudes are notable for a dynamically pastose handling of paint. Herbert Brandl has continued to work out an analytical component in his work accompanied by a high degree of emotion while remaining preoccupied with the fundamental issues related to painting. Since the late 1990s Alpine scenery has occupied a crucial place in Brandl's work. In his expansive paintings, the mountain motif is an optical illusion between abstraction and figuration, between explosive painterly colour spaces and the illusion of a natural spectacle. Herbert Brandl works from photographs and this gives rise to a discussion of the reality of media. Between 1985 and 1991 Herbert Brandl was a guest professor at the Veinna Academy for the Decorative and Applied arts. Since the beginning of his career, Brandl has had numerous one-man shows and has participated in exhibitions of international standing, including documenta IX in Kassel (1992), the group show organised by the Vienna Kunsthalle entitled 'Der zerbrochene Spiegel. Positionen zur Malerei' (1993) and 'Painting on the Move' at the Basle Kunsthalle (2002). Herbert Brandl lives and works in Vienna.