Collection: Günter Brus

Günter Brus (born 1938, Ardning, Austria) is an Austrian artist and one of the founding figures of Viennese Actionism, the radical performance and body art movement that emerged in Vienna in the early 1960s alongside Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Brus’s early actions involved extreme bodily self-inscription, self-mutilation, and transgressive public performance, positioning the body as both medium and site of social and political rupture. His 1968 action Kunst und Revolution at the University of Vienna resulted in criminal prosecution and his subsequent exile from Austria.

From the 1970s onward, Brus shifted his practice toward drawing, writing, and what he termed Bild-Dichtungen (image-poems): densely worked sheets combining text and image in a hallucinatory, allegorical register that extended the psychological intensity of his performance work into a more intimate, institutionally absorbed form. His graphic work draws on Rococo, Expressionism, and Symbolism while maintaining the bodily distortion and psychological extremity of his earlier practice.

Brus has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Kunsthaus Graz. He was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1996.

This collection brings together exhibition ephemera and printed matter connected to Brus’s practice and institutional presentations.