KunstenaarDanishgeb.1944
Peter Brandes
2 actieve items
Peter Brandes was born on 5 March 1944 in Assens, Denmark. His father was Jewish and had fled Nazi persecution before converting to Christianity - a biographical fact that gave Brandes a lifelong preoccupation with questions of faith, exile, and cultural memory. He studied at Odense Cathedral School, graduating in 1964, then read philosophy and French at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Aix-en-Provence. He never attended art school and remained self-taught throughout his career.
Brandes had his artistic breakthrough in the early 1980s. Working in paint, bronze, ceramics, glass mosaic, and photography, he built a practice that consistently returned to the great narrative cycles of Western culture: the Bible, Homer, Greek tragedy, and the German Romantic poets. His paintings are characteristically dense and abstract, often working in deep browns, ochres, and black, with figures and symbols emerging from layered, heavily worked surfaces. The themes of sacrifice, resurrection, and the boundary between human and divine recur across media.
His ceramic output was exceptional in scale. He set the world record for the largest ceramic vessels eleven times, and the Roskilde Jars - a monumental group of ceramic works installed outside Roskilde railway station in 1998 - remain one of his most visible public works. He created stained glass windows for a church at Nordkapp in northern Norway and for the Village of Hope church south of Los Angeles, and his mosaic and liturgical work at Roskilde Cathedral contributed to what critics described as a renaissance in Danish church interiors. Together with his wife, painter Maja Lisa Engelhardt, he was responsible for a significant number of church commissions across Denmark and abroad.
Brandes illustrated Homer's Iliad and produced over 100 works in dialogue with the German Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin following a visit to Tubingen in 2007. In 2013 he became the first visual artist to receive the Friedrich Holderlin Prize, awarded by the City and University of Tubingen. His work entered the collections of the European Parliament, the Ahmanson Foundation in Los Angeles, and institutions across Europe. He presented approximately 50 solo exhibitions and was the subject of more than 130 books and catalogues. He lived and worked in Colombes near Paris. Peter Brandes died on 4 January 2025.
On Auctionet, Brandes appears primarily through Danish auction houses, with Bruun Rasmussen in Aarhus and Lyngby together accounting for more than two thirds of his 32 auction records. His market spans painting, sculpture, prints, ceramics, and glass mosaic - a breadth reflecting his multimedia practice. Top auction prices in the Nordic market have reached 27,000 DKK for a patinated bronze sculpture, with watercolours and religious works on paper following. Three lots remain active on the platform at the time of writing.