Born in Luxembourg City, Robert Brandy (born Brandenburger) grew up in the neighbourhood of Limpertsberg. His parents were both professionally active, yet not artistically. However, the family owned a few paintings and his grandmother cherished the arts. Brandy completed his high school degree with a focus on technical and industrial drawing at the Institut Émile Metz in 1964. He studied fine arts at the École des Beaux-Arts in Aix-en-Provence from 1972 to 1976. Among his teachers was Vincent Bioulès (*1938), a founding member of the Supports/Surfaces group of artists.
Brandy did his military service in 1966 and worked as a tele communicator for an airline between 1968 and 1972. Finally, he became a freelance artist in 1972.
He married a first time in 1969. In 1976, the artist moved back to Luxembourg, where he married his second wife the following year. Their daughter was born in 1983 and in 1989, their son and later painter Kevin B.
Brandy’s large oeuvre consists of paintings, sculptures and prints. Until today, he predominantly employs the techniques of painting with pigments, collage, assemblage and serigraphy (screen printing). Expressive gestures combined with collage elements are most representative of his practice. They typically result in abstract two-dimensional compositions executed in earthy tones.
In search of a personal style, the 1970s represent a period in which Brandy’s painting practice developed most. Indeed, the artist experimented with numerous techniques and subjects in a coherent manner. While oil paintings from the first half of the decade depict figurative elements in the form of fruit, architecture and everyday objects, works created around 1975 illustrate Brandy’s gradual interest in the materiality of a painting’s physical constituents as well as those of the depicted subjects. Accordingly, the canvas, its underlying wooden structure as well as the texture of the paint developed into the artist’s centre of focus. This resulted in art works introducing a third dimension, as can be seen e.g. in Mythologies (1977). Here, parts of the stretched canvas were cut open, thus revealing the space behind it. Additionally, Brandy brought forward the underlying wooden structure by wrapping it in cloth. In accordance with ideologies of Western art from the 1960s and 1970s, when artists focused on the structural components of paintings (mostly the supports) and thereby abandoned painting in a traditional sense, Brandy highlighted these physical aspects of the canvas and its supporting structure. As a result from this exploration of art’s materiality, Brandy’s paintings from the mid- and end 1970s reveal an evolvement from figurative to non-figurative depictions. At the same time, paintings from the mid-1970s bare a shift from rather thick (pastose) layers of oil paint to the loose application of natural pigments. Concurrently, Brandy introduced the collage technique, pasting paper cutouts or objects from his personal environment onto the canvas (e.g. pencils, paintbrushes, his jeans, shirt or the like). In fact, from 1975 onwards, the described act of recycling became a constant in Brandy’s oeuvre.
In 1979 and the early 1980s, Brandy’s preoccupation with the materiality of paintings reached its climax with regard to sculpting the canvas and applying colour in an almost transparent manner. Accordingly, the artist created large-scale paintings in shades of white, which largely consist of empty spaces and parts of the canvas untouched. From an art historical perspective, this practice and understanding of art can be associated with the abovementioned abandon of painting in the 1960s and 1970s (art theorists declared this practice the death of painting in the early 1980s (Danto 4 ; Crimp 69)). Moreover, as the diptych (a painting consisting of two panels) Séance I-III (1980) illustrates, Brandy continued to integrate everyday objects, employ the technique of collage and emphasise the underlying structure by wrapping it or repeating the lines of the cross-shaped wooden bars on the surface. Soon, however, he returned to increasing the amount and intensity of colour. In the same process, he gradually deviated from an understanding of art based on the intellectual examination of the subject matter to return to a more lyrical art practice combing abstract and figurative elements. Accordingly, the mid to end-1980s reveal a series of paintings in earthy tones. These commonly depict strongly simplified fruits on otherwise abstract compositions, executed in an expressive, gestural manner. In 1992 and 1993, Brandy created a number of paintings in dark tones.
After this dark phase, the artist’s colour palette became considerably more intense again in 1996. Indeed, as the painting Having fun (1996) illustrates, Brandy painted with saturated and contrasting colours. In 2000, he created the series Auto Portraits. These depict classic cars and, as a series, represent an excursion into figurative painting. The series Overcovering, created in 2006 and 2007, is characterised by a thin and layered application of pigments in earthy tones paired with blue and red as well as white acrylic paint. With pieces of collage still present, Brandy frequently included graphical elements, such as bamboo twigs, on the otherwise abstract compositions. The paintings disclose multiple layers of paint and thereby play with the illusion of a third dimension. As a result of extending and developing these formal aspects, Brandy created the series Research Surface in 2009.
In 2020 and 2021, Brandy pursued the use of Indian ink, already employed in his darker paintings from the early 1990s. The series distinguishes itself by dynamic and wide brushstrokes in black. In 2021 and 2022, he simultaneously created colourful assemblages with collages that physically reach out into a third space.
While paintings constitute the largest part of Brandy’s oeuvre (estimated at over 3000 works), the artist concurrently worked in numerous other mediums. Between 1978 and 1980, he created his first sculptures, which predominantly take the shape of wooden boxes with window-like transparent sides. On the inside, they consist of everyday objects, e.g. tree branches, cords, fabrics, photographs or written documents. Similar to the installations that Brandy created in the 1980s and 1990s, the boxes are the result of the above-described exploration of the limits of canvas painting. Moreover, in 1979, the artist produced his first of over 120 serigraphs and in 1984, he illustrated his first of over 30 artist’s books in collaboration with authors. From 1994 to 2014, Brandy created art works in multiple mediums in order to build the universe of his imagined other self, Bolitho Blane.
Brandy participated in over 150 solo exhibitions and over 330 group exhibitions across Europe, North America and Asia. His first curated solo exhibition took place at the Palais des Congrès in Aix-en-Provence in 1973. In 1976, his first monographic exhibition at a Luxembourg gallery, the Galerie Paul Brück, was organised. Numerous galleries recurringly presented his art in solo and group shows. Amongst these were Galerie La Cité in Luxembourg (between 1977 and 2006), Galerie Biren in Paris (between 1982 and 1998), Galerie la Main and Debras-Bical in Brussels (between 1983 and 2010), Galerie Radicke in Bonn (1989 - present), Galerie Artline in the Netherlands (1990 - 2014), Galerie Art Wall+B in New York (1993 - 2005), Galerie Ceysson-Bénétière in Luxembourg, France and Switzerland (2008 - present) and Monosgallery in Liège (2013 – present). Among the most important retrospectives were those organised at the theatre of Esch-sur-Alzette (1992), the Centre de gravure et de l’image imprimée in La Louvière (1996), the Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain (MAMAC) in Liège (2013) and the Musée national d’archéologie, d’histoire et d’art (MNAHA) in Luxembourg (2021). Additionally, Brandy participated at the Biennale de Paris (1980) and at the World Exhibition in Sevilla (1992).
Before his studies, Brandy painted with Ota Nalezinek between 1969 and 1971. He collaborated with André Biren and authors such as Guy Helminger, Guy Rewenig, Georges Hausemer, Elise Schmit, Jean Portante, Jean Sorrente, Nathalie Ronvaux, Lambert Schlechter or Mikis Theodorakis for their artist’s books. Brandy frequently exhibited together with artists such as Rico Sequeira, Jean-Marie Biwer, Bertrand Ney, Patricia Lippert or Jeannot Bewing. Furthermore, he had close friendships with art critics Joseph Paul Schneider and Jean Sorrente as well as his gallerists. He frequently worked with Francis van Maele on serigraphies.
Art works by Brandy can be found in numerous public collections. Among these are the collections of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Musée Museum départemental des Hautes-Alpes in Gap, the Museum of Modern Art Birmingham and the MNAHA. Works can also be seen at Lycée Robert Schuman Luxembourg (1983), on the façade of the Centre Culturel in Merl (1987), at the University of Luxembourg (1993) or at the Headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels (1994).
Brandy became a member of the Cercle Artistique du Luxembourg (CAL) in 1980.
In 1988 and 1993, he received the first prize at Luxembourg’s Quinquennale d’Art Moderne. He was awarded the Prix de Raville at the 100th Salon du CAL in 1993. In 2020, Brandy was appointed Knight of the Grand Ducal Order of the Oak Crown for his commitment to Luxembourg culture.
Art historian Christian Mosar argues that Brandy’s artistic style identifies Luxembourg art to this day. While it largely corresponds with the aesthetics of the lyrical abstractionists, who emanated from the École de Paris and were popular among Luxembourg painters from the mid-1950s onwards, author Jean Portante declared Brandy a “son of Supports/Surfaces” (the avant-gardist artist group Supports/Surfaces was most active between 1969 and 1972). Art historian and gallerist Bernard Ceysson argues that, as many European painters of his generation, Brandy pursues the conviction that painting must affirm a reality and attest that it is not fictional. Moreover, art historian Jamie Armstrong claims Brandy to be the first to embody a modern, late 20th century conception of the professional artist in the Grand Duchy (46).
Regarding an art historical interpretation, Brandy’s artistic practice indeed combines techniques and subjects from Modernism and contemporary art. While, according to the artist, still lifes by French modernist Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1904) and the expressive style of Luxembourg painter Joseph Kutter inspired Brandy, the investigation of the materiality of the canvas in the 1970s and early 1980s – and as a result, too the investigation of time and space – allows Brandy to participate in the discourse of contemporary painting. As immediate and spontaneous expressions of his feelings as well as the inclusion of everyday objects, his practice dialogues with reality. In fact, as can be seen in The proud man (1993), a painting grappling with the subject of war, this reality can be one shared by many. Alternatively, the reality can be a personal one, as suggests Souvenir et redécouverte (1975). Here, Brandy integrated a real grape that he had collected during a grape harvest a few years earlier. In the same work, he recalled a personal memory of a grape drawing he had made as a pupil, for which he had received the highest grade in class. Souvenir et redécouverte includes, amongst other pictorial elements, the dried grape from the harvest, a redrawing of the remembered sketch and an inscription of the grade he received.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Jamie. “Robert Brandy. Premier artiste indépendant au Luxembourg ?“ Robert Brandy Face à Lui-même : 50 Ans De Carrière. Ed. Musée national d'histoire et d'art. Luxembourg: Musée national d'histoire et d'art, 2021. Print.
Ceysson, Bernard cited in: “Robert Brandy.” Ceyssonbenetiere. https://www.ceyssonbenetiere.com/fr/artists/Robert-Brandy/. Web. Accessed 11.03.2022.
Crimp, Douglas. “The End of Painting.” October 16 (1981): 69–86, https://doi.org/10.2307/778375. Web. Accessed 11.03.2022.
Danto, Arthur C.. "Introduction: Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary." After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History - Updated Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021: 1-20. Print.
Mosar, Christian. “Pour une histoire de l’art luxembourgeois? Persévérant et sympa à la fois.” d’Lëtzebuerger Land 18.05.2018, http://www.land.lu/page/article/231/334231/FRE/index.html. Web. Accessed 30.06.2020.
Portante, Jean cited in: “Robert Brandy,” ceyssonbenetiere, https://www.ceyssonbenetiere.com/fr/artists/Robert-Brandy/.Web. Accessed 11.03.2022.
Jamie Armstrong
2022-09-27
Please cite this article as follows:
Jamie Armstrong."Robert Brandy."
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