Peter Brandes is one of the most significant Danish visual artists alive today. He is represented in the collections of leading museums worldwide, including the Louvre, and is featured in the most important Danish museums. Peter Brandesâ monumental sculptures and jars can be seen throughout Denmark, and he has decorated a number of Danish churches along with churches in Norway and the United States. In Jerusalem, Brandesâ Isaac Vase, approximately five meters tall, stands at the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem.
Peter Brandesâ oeuvre is gigantic. It spans more than fifty years, and includes such varied forms of artistic expression as painting, sculpture, drawing, graphic art, ceramics, and not least photography and stained glass, for which he has developed new techniques. Dialogue with traditionâparticularly the Jewish, Greek, and Christian traditionsâruns throughout his work, marking Brandes as one of Denmarkâs foremost practitioners of cultural migration.
"Peter Brandes: Meridian of Art" is the first monograph on the art of Peter Brandes. The book pursues a series of central themes that cut across Brandesâ artistic production, connecting and traversing these with lines that the bookâs author, Ettore Rocca, calls the âmeridian of art.â The expression âmeridianâ is borrowed from the German poet Paul Celan, the author with whom Brandes has felt the greatest kinship throughout his career. For Celan, a meridian designates the indestructible, invisible line in a poetic conversation. Correspondingly, in the cultural migration that weaves throughout Brandes' art, Rocca finds a meridian that at once appears impossible and indestructible.