Stephen Brandes was born in Wolverhampton, UK in 1966 and now lives and works in Cork after moving to Ireland in 1993. He has exhibited extensively in Ireland and internationally including solo projects Klutz Paradiso, RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin; Chutzparadiso, West Cork Arts Centre, Cork; 'Travelogue' at Rubicon Gallery Dublin, ‘Ways of Escape’ Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin, along with recent group exhibitions Girl Power and Boy Hood, Kunsthallen Brandts, Denmark; ‘Cross the Line’ Conrads Gallery, Duesseldorf Germany; ‘Permaculture’, Project, Dublin; ‘Necessary Journeys’, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin; ‘The Retreat’, City Limits, Melbourne, Australia; ‘C2’, Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork and numerous international Art Fairs with Rubicon Gallery. He represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2005 as part of ' Ireland at Venice'. His work is represented in the Irish Museum of Modern Art Collection and the Office of Public Works, Ireland and Private Collections in Ireland, Europe and USA. He has worked as a curator of independent art projects, most notably ‘Superbia’, and ‘Superbia2’.

Brandes' initial body of work grew from a visual diary he made in 1999 during a recreation of his grandmother's flight through Europe, to escape from the pogroms in Romania in 1913. His work has since developed into a series of elaborate visual fictions in various forms, encompassing a lexicon of styles and materials - from small scruffy paintings and collages, to vast highly detailed drawings on unexpected surfaces (like used floor vinyl or straight onto the gallery wall), which interweave this history with his own experience and invention. Using the pictorial language of European fairytales, 20th century poster design and medieval cartography, his large graphic works represent fantastical, dysfunctional landscapes that suggest places from history and fairytales, while the smaller paintings and drawings often imply imagined fragments of ‘tales’, as if told by a bewildered traveller whom we suspect has only left his armchair to put on the kettle. Throughout his work, Brandes misquotes both the familiar and the exotic to absurd effect, whilst injecting the fantastical with dry social observation.

Click on image to view

Artist Homepage | Resume | Bibliography | Past Exhibitions