Good Old West Berlin

“Of course everything that happened later has to do with West Berlin, for this city is the only one that I feel any homesickness towards in my heart,” writes Günter Brus in his autobiographical volume of stories Good Old West Berlin. In 1969 Brus, together with his family, fled from the Austrian authorities to the divided German capital, to Gerhard Rühm and Oswald Wiener. “I immediately perceived Berlin as a sort of homeland, at least as a plaster cast after a severe fracture of the neck and leg.”

Running parallel to the large retrospective of Günter Brus in the Martin-Gropius-Bau, this exhibition is dedicated to his Berlin years in a partially new, partially familiar artistic setting. In Berlin he founded the “Austrian government-in-exile” together with Otmar Bauer, Hermann Nitsch, Gerhard Rühm and Oswald Wiener and published their magazine, the Schastrommel (The Crap Drum). In Berlin the first joint works were created with Christian Ludwig Attersee, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Dominik Steiger, and others. In Oswald Wiener’s legendary Berlin pub Exil, Joseph Beuys, Markus Lüpertz, Tomas Schmit, Ludwig Gosewitz and many others sat around the same table. It was also in Berlin that the editions of Armin Hundertmark, whose boxes remain unsurpassed in terms of quality and demands, were created. The core of the exhibition is the Berlin Scene of the 1970s, the artistic milieu in which Brus lived and worked, the collaborations, mutual dedications and collective events and exhibitions. Participating artists are Christian Ludwig Attersee, KP Brehmer, Bernhard Johannes Blume, Ludwig Gosewitz, Antonius Hoeckelmann, Dorothy Iannone, Markus Lüpertz, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Tomas Schmit, Dominik Steiger, Andrea Tippel, Oswald Wiener, and others.

Curated by Roman Grabner