With Great Gesture Austrian painter Herbert Brandl has established himself as one of the most important representatives of contemporary painting with his large-format, gesturally expressive works. His paintings oscillate between abstraction and figuration, observations of nature are often the focus of his works. His irrepressible creative process and a powerful and experimental use of color characterize his fascinating work. This catalogue documents Herbert Brandl’s exhibition Spirit Lead Me at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder in Vienna. Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interview and the multifaceted essays by Cathérine Hug and Thomas D. Trummer enable readers to delve even deeper into Brandl’s fascinating work.
Katharina Grosse (*1961) is considered to be one of the defining painters of her generation; her powerfully colourful interventions have had a determining effect on contemporary art dialogue. Grosse’s works cross the boundaries of space and concept with expansive gestures and enormous vitality and call for a new reception culture.Katharina Grosse’s spectacular projects – as seen, for example, in the recent solo exhibitions in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Helsinki Art Museum – reveal a powerful and expansive painting that celebrates the processual, the unfinished and the ostensible. The handsome publication presents impressive images which lead the reader through Grosse’s multidimensional work and illustrate the broad creative spectrum of this exceptional artist’s oeuvre through the most recent examples of her in-situ praxis.