Rago Auctions

Raised under Soviet influence in East Germany, Andreas Brandt (b. 1935) early on developed his own rigorous and defiant vision of freedom that would materialize in his spare, mathematically inclined compositions. Generally considered to be most closely linked with the Swiss Concrete artists, in particular Max Bill and Camille Graeser, Brandt sought to present color “as an autonomous form” and to show “the tensions it creates with other autonomous forms in the rectangular area.” After moving to Berlin in 1955 to study art, Brandt worked as a scene-painter for television in the 1960s and had his first solo exhibition in Cologne’s Peuckert Gallery in 1970. Travels to the U.S. in the early 1970s — including a meeting with Sam Francis — cemented Brandt’s understanding of himself as a European artist, and he continued on his pursuit to distill color and form into their most fundamental identities. The dynamic between these identities was always central to his efforts — as Sabine Weder Arlitt wrote of Brandt, “A painting with only one stripe would be an absurdity for him. It must always exist in relationship to something else.”