Günter Brus, one of the founders of the Viennese Actionism movement, has died. Actionism, developed in Vienna in the 1960s and ’70s by Brus with collaborators Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, encompassed body art, performance, happening and action painting. The artists often used their bodies in ways that challenged the viewers, breaking taboos and shocking the art audiences of the time. His pioneering work, however, had more than just shock value: it was a commentary on the conservative Austrian establishment at the time, which got him sentenced to six months in prison for a performance in 1968 (he fled to Berlin, returning only in 1976) and a novel approach to using the body as part of his work that may have opened a path for many other artists, including the following generation of female artists like VALIE EXPORT. ‘Self-painting,’ Brus remarked in 1965, ‘is a further development of painting. The picture surface has lost its function as the sole means of conveying expression. … By using my body as a means of expression, the result is an event that the camera captures and the viewer can experience.’
A significant survey exhibition of Brus’s work will open at Kunsthaus Bergenz in Austria on 17 February. The show will focus on the photographic documentation of his epochal happenings and performances as well as his Informal paintings, including late series of paintings made during the COVID-19 pandemic.
