Patricia Low Contemporary is delighted to announce Mountain High, an exhibition of new paintings by eminent Austrian artist Herbert Brandl. Specially created for Patricia Low Contemporary and marking Brandl‘s first exhibition with the gallery, the 12 paintings on view are a showcase of the artist’s renowned mountain landscapes that seamlessly blend figuration with abstraction.

“Living in Gstaad, I’ve tended to resist mountain themes, but Herbert Brandl is really the master of this motif,” says Patricia Low. Seeing the suite of works in the artist’s studio earlier this year, Low was captivated by their vibrancy and power. Large in scale, and executed in acrylic on canvas, the works give expression to the sublime, both in terms of their vivid colours and monumentality. Associated most often with the Neue Wilde movement, Brandl‘s treatment of landscape is profoundly expressive, and his fascination with the impenetrable Mount Everest, for example, is rendered in energetic daubs of black and white paint against a backdrop of resonant midnight blue. Some of the works show the mountain’s jagged peak, others are more suggestive — snapshots of an abstracted topography. With this years-long study, Brandl‘s paintings attempt to capture, in bursts of dramatic brushwork, the ever-changing face and textures of this infamous force of nature.