Eugene Brands

EugFne Brands was born on January 15, 1913, in Amsterdam. From 1931 to 1934, he studied advertising design at the Amsterdam School of Applied Arts. After working for several months as an advertising designer at various agencies, he chose to pursue a career as a visual artist. He was self-taught in this field.

In 1948, he became a member of the Dutch experimental group REFLEX, which later—for some of its artists—evolved into CoBrA. His meeting with Willem Sandberg, former director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, led to the exhibition in which CoBrA made its first appearance in the Netherlands in 1949. Brands left CoBrA a year after its founding in 1949 to retreat to his studio for the next 10 years and draw inspiration from “the world of the child.” To this end, he discovered a special technique: oil paint on paper.

Starting in 1967, he taught Free Painting at the Royal Academy of Modern Art and Design in ’s-Hertogenbosch, among other positions. Brands has had numerous solo exhibitions both in the Netherlands and abroad. Major retrospective exhibitions were held in 1969 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in 1988 at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, in 1990 at the Beyerd in Breda, and in 1997 and 2001 at the CoBrA Museum of Modern Art in Amstelveen.

EugFne Brands lived and worked in Amsterdam until 1974, when he moved into a summer residence in Nunspeet on the Hoge Veluwe. There, in the silence of nature, he felt the mystery of the cosmos more strongly than ever. For him, the mystery lay locked within the beauty and colors of both crocuses and violets, as well as the reflection of the garden pond.

In 1993, Brands decided to stop painting on canvas. It had become too physically demanding for him. From then on, he limited himself to his beloved gouaches on paper, because the gouache technique best suited the freedom he sought to achieve.

In 1999, he traded his studio in Nunspeet for one in the South of France, which he was unfortunately only able to enjoy for a short time. Eugène Brands passed away on January 15, 2002, in the comfort of his own home, on the day he celebrated his 89th birthday.