Stephen Brandes

Brandes1
Stephen Brandes 'Parc Du Souvenir', Talbot Rice Gallery

Parc Du Souvenir

29 October – 17 December 2016


For Parc Du Souvenir Stephen Brandes presented a new body of work including a monumental drawing, digital slideshows, a selection of collages and a sculptural billboard installed in the University of Edinburgh’s historic Old College Quad.  

Brandes works out of his studio in rural County Cork, right on the western periphery of the European continent and detached from the maelstrom of metropolitan life. From there he spins yarns that cross a vast nebula of ideas and interests including: modern European history, Enlightenment philosophy, expressions of ideology in rural and urban environments, architecture and monuments, the Northern Romantic Landscape tradition, Dada and Constructivist collage. Wildly eclectic, his appropriation of images, ideas and cultural iconography, is fed by voracious historical research, personal pilgrimage and debates provoked or overheard in provincial pubs.

Parc Du Souvenir was inspired by the lives and legacies of two very different individuals. Patrick Geddes, an eccentric Scottish polymath who transformed the Old Town of Edinburgh and subsequently went on to be a radical influence on city planning in the early 20th century. And Gűnter Grass, author of The Tin Drum, who as a youth witnessed the utter destruction of his home city, Danzig, during the Second World War. Through his typical multi-disciplinary approach, Brandes developed these points of interest into a broader meditation, not only on the interrelationships between Scotland and mainland Europe, but on historical periods of ‘enlightenment’ and their subsequent periods of ‘suspension’. Architecture, monuments and artifacts recurred throughout the work as displaced signs, remaining after the ideologies that produced them have collapsed, out of context and often out of shape.

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Stephen Brandes (born 1966). Lives and works in Co. Cork, Ireland. In 2005 he co-represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale and has continued to exhibit both nationally and internationally. Solo exhibitions include: The Last Travelogue of A.Sitzfleisch, Norfolk & Norwich Festival, 2014; April 22nd – from the Last Travelogue of A. Sitzfleisch, RHA Gallery, Dublin, 2013; Tumbleweed, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin in 2010; A Grand Tour of the Invisible North, Galerie Robert Drees, Hannover, Germany, 2009; Klutz Paradiso, RHA Gallery, Dublin, 2006; Ways of Escape, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, 2004.
 

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