Eugène Brands

Gouache on heavy water colour paper. 38x50 cm. Title: 6054, Flowers in a white vase. April 16, 1978. (Provenance: G. Hofland collection)

Paper has been folded at the bottom left.

Eugene Brands, Amsterdam 1913 - Amsterdam 2002

In 1946 Eugene Brands took part in the group exhibition "Young Painters" in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His innovative work impressed the other exhibitors and Eugene Brands was persuaded to join the Experimental Group. Eugene brands maintained contacts with the Stedelijk Museum and this led to the "International exhibition of experimental art" in 1949.

In the meantime, the COBRA movement had also been set up by painters such as Constant Nieuwenhuis, Karel Appel and Corneille and the experimental group took it in. The large group exhibition at the Stedelijk was actually the first public presentation of COBRA and various works by Eugene Brands were on display. His work from that period showed a relationship with the sensitive abstract work of Piet Ouborg. Eugene Brands was also interested in primitive folk art, the music of which appealed to him in particular. He tried to incorporate the magical elements of these cultures into his work.

The innovative work of the COBRA painters was not understood and aroused great anger from the public and the press. After disagreements about the exhibition, Eugene Brands left the COBRA group and retired to his painting studio. This self-imposed isolation lasted about ten years.

During this period he made work that was inspired by children's drawings. The spontaneous drawings of his young daughter Eugenie fascinated Brands and were a grateful source of inspiration. The spontaneous expression with which he depicts the magical world of a child was a typical COBRA trait. He was also influenced by the work of Paul Klee and Marc Chagall. Eugene Brands' childlike performances gradually acquired a fairytale atmosphere, in which people or things fly or float. Beautiful small works, mostly oil on paper and gouache, were the result.

Under the influence of American abstract expressionism, abstraction returns in the work of Eugene Brands around 1960. His canvases became bigger and the way of painting woolier and sweeter. The mystery of the universe, a central theme in his work, was prominent. He began to paint shimmering areas of color in soft, poetic colors, an impenetrable cottony substance.

From 1967 Eugene Brands worked as a teacher of free paintings at the Royal Academy of Art in Den Bosch. The abstracted landscapes with 'cow spots' and cloud formations date from this period, which were inspired, among other things, by the landscapes that Brands saw from the train.

Eugene Brands has worked in Amsterdam, Nunspeet and later in the South of France until a very old age. His work can be found in numerous private and museum collections.