Brandes, Peter (1944- )

Peter Brandes ' earliest works belonged to the expressionist flow, but around the middle of the 1960s he took it concrete, geometriserende painting up. From his earliest youth stayed b. often in France, and in 1965-66, he for a longer period of time down at the foot of St. Victoire mountain and immersed himself in the subject, who had played so great a role in Cézanne's art. B. went to see Cézanne's mountain as a starting point for today's painting. Since then, he sought further back, to the Egyptian and Greek, archaic sculpture, and not least the last has been an important part of B's artistic ballast. In 1972 moved b. to France and acquired a couple of years later the House in Colombes, outside Paris, which had previously belonged to Asger Jorn. Around the same time left (B). the concrete imagery and reprised it expressive. B. occupies a prominent place in the abstract ekspressionismes new breakthrough that really manifested itself around 1980. B. has, however, never entirely put his trust in the spontaneous. He has, at times, performed his paintings on a lithograph or a photo State, for in the graphic or photographic structure to have a counterbalance to the spontaneous and emotional. B. prefers to work with certain basic shapes or structures. In 1980, he introduced a hybrid form, which in itself had admitted both Cézanne's mountain, the archaic Lions of Delos and other relics from the past, which had fascinated him. In the second half of the 1980s were torso-motif a recurrent starting point. With this as a skeleton and traction have b. painted a large number of images with a dense masonry construction picture surface of great coloristic intensity. The choice of the archaic torso is no more random than Cézanne mountain, it is linked to a series of values and ideas about anything originally human, a starting point for the European person's self-image. B. 's work has its center of gravity in the painting, but he also has a significant graphical production and, not forgetting, photographically. B. photographing sculpture on his travels. He works with photography as a medium, who express themselves using light. Things appear with diffuse contoured, radiating a light that seems to come from within, and that evokes past detritus to new life, without the experience of the historical distance is lost. In his dealings with the past shape the world will B. at once stick on a core of pure, humane content and indulge in various colours, transformation in time, in the light, in the mind. In the late 1980s and early 1990s are ceramics, sculpture and glass mosaic come to play a greater role among B's forms of expression. His first major sculpture Freedom from 1988 as the painting Freedom arm combines the torso and the swollen arm, but unites further this form with some animal traits. In the field of ceramics, he has moved on from reliefs and minor characters to the jars, which gradually has assumed enormous dimensions, culminating in the nearly 5-meter high Maja and Isaac from 1992-93.