Günter Brus
Günter Brus ( born September 27, 1938 in Ardning in Styria) is an Austrian performance artist and painter.
Günter Brus is one of the most radical representatives of the Vienna activism. 1970 because of " denigration of the Austrian state symbols " aggravated arrest sentenced to six months (just before the abolition of this punishment ), he lived a long time in West Berlin in exile to escape the prison. While he aroused in the 1960s, especially with his actions sensation, he has gone back to the drawing since the early 1970s.
Life and work
Brus graduated from the School of Applied Arts in Graz and went in 1956 to Vienna, where he studied painting and his closest friend in the next few years Alfons Schilling met.
Impressed by the German Expressionism of the turn of the century, by Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh, then by abstract expressionism and by artists such as Emilio Vedova, he began in the fall of 1960 with a radically gestural, the image format busting painting. His later companion Otto Muehl, who got to know him at the time, recalls: " The color was on the picture sometimes explodes like a bomb on impact. That was total creative excess. [ ... ] The whole room was covered with splashes of color, lay on the floor of the dried paint sludge centimeter high. " Shortly before his first major exhibition in conjunction with shilling he has in May 1961 to the military. After military service he fell into a psychological crisis, and did not begin until the end of 1962 working again.
1964 leads Brus his first action, Ana through. From the outset, it was essential for him to put his own body into the center of the action, and in the three-part second action, hand-painting. Head painting. Kopfzumalung, one or more hours protracted Self-painting process, he was also pleased with the process. He broke away completely from the informal painting and carried out numerous actions ( Self-painting II, self-mutilation, tetanus, tranfusion, torture ) by.
1966 designed Brus and Muehl the idea of the total action as the compound of material action Muehl and Brus'schen self-mutilation. A first sample was placed on the Destruction in Art Symposium in London.
In 1967 he sat in the work osmosis, sweaters, inhalation - exhalation body language with the theme of birth apart and integrated into its 23 action his daughter Diana. The work of Brus went further toward total body analysis: He urinated and defecated during the actions, scratched with razor blades the skin and masturbated. In 1968 it came to a head by an in-depth into the history of art event which is dubbed by the media as university obscenity and in their wake, he was tried and sentenced and eventually went into exile. His last action (June 1970), with which he tried to walk again until all physical boundaries, called appropriately enough ordeal.
Günter Brus was a participant in Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 in the Department of Individual mythologies and the Documenta 6 (1977 ) and the Documenta 7 in 1982 as an artist.
Brus had accompanied his entire actionistic work with drawings and paintings. From 1970, beginning with the wallet -wisp, he developed it new possibilities of a combination of literature and the visual arts. It originated work, which he calls image - seals and open up a new chapter in Brus ' work, the fruit of which is the rich graphic and literary work of the 70s and 80s. For his life's work he received the 1996 Grand Austrian State Prize for Fine Arts.
Since summer 2005, Brus columnist and signatory is the Austrian monthly magazine date. He lives and works in Graz and in the Canary Islands.
With a collection purchase for the Neue Galerie Graz put the former Cultural Officer of Styria, Kurt Flecker, 2008 the foundation stone for its own " Brus - Museum ". The BRUSEUM, which opened November 26, 2011 at the new location of the Neue Galerie Graz Joanneum Quarter, is conceived as a permanent effective public exhibition site. It is dedicated to preserving the central works of the artist as well as the scientific treatment of his work.