Biography
Eugène Brands (*15 January 1913 Amsterdam NL | † 15 January 2002 Amsterdam NL)was a Dutch painter and an early member of the CoBrA avant-garde art movement
Brands attended the commercial school Amsterdam before he studied advertising design at the Kunstnijverheidsschool in Amsterdam from 1931 until 1934. After some months working as an advertising designer, he decided to become a visual artist. In 1939, he already had his first exhibition in the town hall from Zandvoort. As an autodidact, he went through a highly individualistic development. In 1939/1940 Brands started to work with surrealistic objets trouves and during World War II he experimented with informal ink and watercolour techniques. Brands had an abiding interest in pre-colonised cultures, especially their music. Coming from there he was constantly guided by the urge to seek out the magical elements in all appearances. Throughout his oeuvre, this can be found back, because his pictures were full of rich motifs and enigmatic signs.
In 1946, he met Karel Appel and Corneille at the exhibition Jonge Schilders/ Junge Künstler at the Stedelijk Museum and two years later he became member of the Experimentele Groep REFLEX, which was founded by Corneille, Karel Appel and Constant. After Appel and Corneille founded the group CoBra they asked Eugène Brands to become a member. Not much later Eugène Brands met Willem Sandberg, the former director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. This led to the large exhibition at which CoBra was presented for the first time to the Dutch public at the Stedelijk Museum in 1949. Only one year later Brands left CoBra and lived rather withdrawn in his studio for the upcoming ten years. From 1960 he gradually gave up figurative representation in favour of abstraction. 1976 Brands was appointed to teach painting at the Koninklijke Akademie voor Moderne Kunst en Vormgeving in ‘s-Hertogenbosch.
In 1993, he decided to stop working with canvases since it became physically too demanding for him. After this time he concentrated more on gouaches on paper which was his favourite medium because he could find the freedom in creating he always wanted to achieve. In 1999 Brands moved to the south of France where he died in 2002.
Brands had numerous solo and group shows in the Netherlands and abroad whereas important exhibitions have been in 1969 in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1988 in the Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam, in 1990 in the Beyerd in Breda and in 1997 and 2001 in the CoBra Museum for Modern Art in Amstelveen. His work can be found in numerous collections such as the Stedelijk Museum.