Andreas Brandt, born in 1935 in Halle, was a German painter. In 1954 he studied biology at the University of Halle. In 1955 he moved to West Berlin, where he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Berlin under Ernst Schumacher until 1961. Then he worked as a freelance painter and was from 1982 to 2001 Professor of Textile Design at the College of Fine Arts Hamburg. In 1970 he held a guest lecture at the HfbK Berlin.
Andreas Brandt was a member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund, at whose annual exhibitions he attended eight times between 1966 and 1980. Brandt is regarded as a representative of Concrete Art, an art movement within Constructivism, which seeks to create a concrete, autonomous pictorial world without any reference or depiction function using simple, geometric forms. At the end of the sixties Brandt turned away from the representation of external reality under the impression of the young American painting and developed a very personal, conceptual imagery with a precisely formulated, harmoniously balanced system structure and reduced color chords. He dealt with the systematic distribution of brightly colored, black or gray lines on a white background. At first only with verticals on landscape formats, but later also horizontal lines and portrait formats were added.
In his restriction to straight, equally wide lines or stripes on monochrome backgrounds Brandt was one of the most radical and timid concrete painters. He explored the balance of the surfaces and the proportions of the colors. For many observers, his work creates an unexpected spatiality and the elements gain a certain amount of vibration.
“Material is the surface, are the colors. The aim is to set the surface – in its limit and extent – in motion through color. To create space, autonomous pictorial space. To find orders. Consider the surface itself as a design tool. Color, independent of the material, free from all associative, all symbolic, as a fundamental artistic value.” – Andreas Brandt, 1970
