Eugène Brands is born in Amsterdam in 1913. In the early 1930s, he follows a training to become an advertising designer, but after a few months’ work in this field, he decides to become a painter.
In 1939, Brands has his first one-man exhibition in Amsterdam. In 1946, he participates in the exhibition ‘Jonge schilders’ in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. His fellow-exhibitors Karel Appel, Corneille and Anton Rooskens engage him into the Nederlandse Experimentele Groep, which merges into Cobra in 1948. After a notorious and tumultuous exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in 1949, Brands leaves the Cobra group.
Only after leaving Cobra, typical Cobra motifs start to appear in Brands’s work. He is inspired by the child’s world and paints naïve-looking scenes and figures, mostly with oil paint on paper.
In 1961, he returns to the abstract painting which he has practiced during the late forties. His preference for working on paper stays, but he exchanges oil paint for gouache. In this period, he also works on canvas, but on a much smaller scale. Characteristic for his work in the sixties and after, are the shimmering, cloudlike patterns in soft, poetic colours. His credo ‘panta rhei’ (everything flows) becomes a popular theme in his paintings.
Brands dies on January 15, 2002, the day he turns 89.
