Herbert Brandl

Herbert Brandl was born on 17 January 1959 in Graz, Austria. From 1978 to 1983 he studied at the Hochschule fur angewandte Kunst Wien (University of Applied Arts Vienna), in the classes of Herbert Tasquil and Peter Weibel, and emerged as part of the loose group of Austrian and German painters known as the Neue Wilde, or "New Wild Ones," known for large-format, expressive, color-driven canvases.

His international profile grew through the 1980s and 1990s: he showed at the Biennale de Paris in 1985, participated in the 20th Sao Paulo Biennial in 1989, and was included in documenta IX in Kassel in 1992. In 1997 he received the Preis fur Bildende Kunst der Stadt Wien. From 2004 to 2019 he held a professorship in painting at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. In 2007 he represented Austria at the 52nd Venice Biennale, Austrian Pavilion. His late career included a major solo survey at the Belvedere in Vienna in 2020.

Brandl died suddenly of a heart attack on 27 July 2025 in Vienna, at the age of 66. Two weeks before his death, he had been named a recipient of Austria's Grand State Prize for Fine Arts (Grosser Osterreichischer Staatspreis), which was conferred posthumously, and in 2024 he had received both the Kulturpreis der Stadt Graz and the Ehrenzeichen des Landes Steiermark.

Brandl was consistently framed as a painter of landscape and atmosphere rendered through abstraction, most often mountains, water, and weather distilled into broad fields of color. The Belvedere's 2020 solo presentation, held under museum director Stella Rollig, situated his practice within a broader tradition of landscape based abstraction. In 2007 he represented Austria at the Venice Biennale's Austrian Pavilion. Critics and curators generally placed him within the Neue Wilde generation, treating his mature work as a continuation of romantic landscape painting through gestural, near monochrome fields.

Brandl's auction market is concentrated in Austrian and German houses, with results historically ranging from the tens of thousands of euros up into the low hundreds of thousands. His current auction record, an untitled abstract painting that sold for EUR 175,500 at Dorotheum in Vienna on 19 November 2025, was described by the house itself as the highest price ever realized for his work at auction. Other recent six-figure and near-six-figure results include EUR 97,500 at Dorotheum in November 2024 and EUR 91,000 at Dorotheum in May 2025, alongside sales in the EUR 88,000 to 90,000 range reported by Lempertz and Art.Salon. Volume remains modest relative to his exhibition profile, and no US dollar equivalent for the current record has been independently confirmed.

Brandl's market is now in an estate-transition phase. He died in July 2025, no catalogue raisonne has been confirmed, and no formal estate authentication body has yet been named in public sources; the galleries that represented him during his lifetime, principally Galerie nachst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwalder, Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, and Patricia Low Contemporary, remain the primary reference points for verification. His auction record was set only months after his death and the sample of high-value sales is still small, so collectors should treat any single result, including the current record, with the caution appropriate to a thin and recently repricing market.