Günter Brus

Impressed by German Expressionism at the turn of the century, by Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh, then also by Abstract Expressionism and by artists such as Emilio Vedova, he began in the autumn of 1960 with a radically gestural painting that exploded the picture format. Brusen's works from this period are attempts to break out of the classical panel painting. His later companion Otto Muehl, who met him at that time, remembers: "The paint sometimes exploded like a bomb when it hit the picture. That was total creative excess. [...] The whole room was covered with splashes of paint, there was inches of dried paint sludge on the floor." Shortly before his first major exhibition together with Schilling, he had to go into the army in May 1961. After completing his military service, he fell into a psychological crisis and did not start working again until the end of 1962. Brusen's striving to break out of the medium of the 'picture' became clearer. In the following, he created 'spatial pictures' in which the formal boundaries of the canvas no longer played a role.
In 1964 Brus carried out his first performance, working title Ana. From the beginning, it was essential for him to place his own body at the centre of the action, and in the three-part second action, Hand Painting. Head painting. Head painting, a self-painting process that lasted several hours, he was also satisfied with the process. He turned away from painting and carried out numerous actions (self-painting II, self-mutilation, rigor mortis, transfusion, ordeal). All these "actions" can be seen as a further development of informal painting, and painting and handling colours continue to play a central role.
In 1966 Brus and Muehl conceived the idea of Totalaktion as a combination of Muehl's Materialaktion and Brus's self-mutilations. A first sample was given at the Destruction in Art Symposium in London.
In 1967, in the work Osmosis, Pullover, Inhale - Exhale, he dealt with the theme of birth in body language and integrated his little daughter Diana into his 23rd action. Brus' works went further in the direction of total body analysis: he urinated and defecated during the actions, scratched his skin with razor blades and masturbated. In the action Der Staatsbürger Brus betrachtet seinen Körper (1968) at the latest, it became clear that the actions were also intended as a critique of the state. In the same year, an event that went down in art history caused a scandal and was dubbed "Uni-Ferkelei" by the media, as a result of which he was prosecuted and sentenced and finally went into exile.[4] His last action (June 1970), with which he once again tried to go to all physical limits, was sensibly called Zerreißprobe.
Günter Brus participated in Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 in the section Individual Mythologies and was represented as an artist at Documenta 6 (1977) and Documenta 7 in 1982.
Brus had already accompanied his entire actionist work with drawings and paintings. From 1970 onwards, he began to write the novel Irrwisch, which was underpinned by numerous drawings, and from this he developed new possibilities for combining literature and visual art. This resulted in works that he calls picture-poems and which opened up a new phase in Brusen's oeuvre, the fruit of which is the rich graphic and literary oeuvre of the 1970s and 1980s. For his life's work he was awarded the Great Austrian State Prize for Fine Arts in 1996.
Since summer 2005, Brus has been a columnist and illustrator for the Austrian monthly magazine Datum. He lives and works in Graz and on the Canary Islands.
With a collection purchase for the Neue Galerie Graz, Kurt Flecker, the then cultural advisor of Styria, laid the foundation stone for his own Brus Museum in 2008. The "BRUSEUM", which opened on 26 November 2011 at the Neue Galerie Graz's new location in the Joanneum district, is conceived as a permanent public exhibition space. It is dedicated to the preservation of central works by the artist as well as to the scholarly study of his oeuvre.
His wife Ana played an important role in Brus' work. In a newspaper interview in 2018, she told how she had taken part in Rudolf Schwarzkogler's "Wedding" campaign because Schwarzkogler's girlfriend would never have been willing to show her breasts and Schwarzkogler was too shy to ask a woman. In addition, she had once gone to a pharmacy to get 40 condoms for a campaign by Hermann Nitsch, because Nitsch had not dared to buy them himself. Even the saleswoman at the pharmacy did not dare to call the product by its name.