Günter Brus

To mark the artist’s 80th birthday, Belvedere 21 is dedicating a comprehensive retrospective to the oeuvre of Günter Brus.

“In keeping with this year’s motto ‘Spirit of “68”,’ which underpins the overall activities of Belvedere 21 during 2018, this exhibition honors Günter Brus as the great art rebel of the 1960s. 50 years after the radical “Kunst und Revolution” event, we will show that Brus has never stopped developing and reinventing his artistic material time and again,” according to Stella Rollig, Director General of the Belvedere and Belvedere 21.

Günter Brus is now considered one of Austria´s most important international artists. As a representative of Viennese Action Art, during the 1960s he shone a light on the powerful presence of the physical and psychological constitution of man and the oppression of the individual to social rules. With his radical, body-based and performative work, he succeeded in detaching himself from the “brand” of Viennese Action Art and has since gone down in history as the fundamental pioneer of international action and performance art. In 1970, Günter Brus turned his back on Action Art and focused increasingly on the medium of drawing, with “image poems” and theater works.

A particular highlight of the retrospective is the comprehensive presentation of selected series of works. Alongside the familiar action photos, supplemented by material that has rarely been exhibited until now, Brus’s serial drawings and “image poems,” including the 160-part cycle Leuchtstoffpoesie und Zeichenchirurgie (Luminescence Poetry and Drawing Surgery), will be shown in their entirety. A total of around 120 different work cycles and works that altogether total more than 700 individual objects can be seen in the exhibition, including films and previously unknown series of works.

“The exhibition on the upper floor of Belvedere 21 offers an overview of the artist’s entire oeuvre and makes correlations visible. Hence the theater projects, the cycles of drawings and the artist’s books, along with the early gestural painting and the familiar actions, are evidence of Brus’s radical idea of art as a constant destruction of the artwork, or more precisely its traditional form as panel painting,” explains curator Harald Krejci.

The major Günter Brus retrospective at Belvedere 21 closely addresses six themes: painting in an extended context, Günter and Anna Brus, image and narration, collaborations, theater and psyche, and the Berlin period.

Curator: Harald Krejci

#GuenterBrus21

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.

Press images are available for download under http://www.belvedere21.at/press21