Eugène Brands - Screen printing. Unicorn - Sold

Eugène Brands was born on January 15, 1913, in Amsterdam. From 1931 to 1934, he studied advertising design at the Amsterdam School of Arts and Crafts. After working for several months as an advertising designer at various agencies, he chose to pursue a career in visual arts. He was self-taught.
In 1948, he joined the Dutch Experimental group REFLEX, which, in the case of several artists, later evolved into CoBrA. His meeting with Willem Sandberg, former director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, led to the exhibition in which CoBrA presented itself in the Netherlands for the first time in 1949. Brands left CoBrA a year after its founding in 1949, retreating to his studio for the next ten years to draw inspiration from "the world of the child." He discovered a special technique for this: oil paint on paper.
Since 1967, he has taught Free Painting at the Royal Academy of Modern Art and Design in 's-Hertogenbosch, among other places. Brands has had numerous solo exhibitions at home and abroad. Major retrospectives were held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1969, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in 1988, the Beyerd in Breda in 1990, and the CoBrA Museum of Modern Art in Amstelveen in 1997 and 2001.
Eugène Brands lived and worked in Amsterdam until 1974, when he moved into a summer residence in Nunspeet, in the Hoge Veluwe National Park. There, in the tranquility of nature, he felt the mystery of the cosmos more strongly than ever. The beauty, the colors of both crocuses and violets, and the reflection of the pond in the garden, held the mystery for him.
In 1993, Brands decided to stop painting on canvas. It had become too physically demanding. After that, he limited himself to his beloved gouaches on paper, as the gouache technique best suited the freedom he desired.
In 1999, he exchanged his studio in Nunspeet for one in the South of France, which he unfortunately enjoyed only briefly. Eugène Brands died at home on January 15, 2002, the day he celebrated his 89th birthday.
Panta Rhei, his credo!
The Panta Rhei, "everything flows," would always dominate his painting. This was also the case in the years when he focused on the Mystery of the Universe, which led to his masterful paintings like "Glorious Dawn at Venice" (1983) and "Daybreak" (1986). These paintings are included in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where a large number of his works are housed.