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8/9/2008

Gunter Brus

MAK Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, Wien

Curator Kathrin Pokorny-Nagel

For the 70th birthday of Günter Brus, the MAK gives a survey of the drawing œuvre of one of the most important contemporary Austrian artists in a show entitled “GÜNTER BRUS. Midnight Dawn”, featuring more than 300 individual works from the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Radicalism, drama, excessiveness, and uncompromisingness have always characterized Brus’ work, both his action art and graphic art. A synthesis of poetry and painting, his image poems mark an independent stage in the artist’s life-work. The act of relating two different media – text and image fused into a medium of its own, the image poem – is also found in the work of artists as well known as Paul McCarthy and Raymond Pettibon who took Günter Brus’ work as an orientation point.
The tension unfolding between figure and language is at the heart of Günter Brus’ drawing art. Sentences, narratives, poems give distinct meaning to the partly naturalistic, partly expressionist graphic art works. The eccentric text- and-image compositions appear like injuries, wounds, dreamlike or nightmarish visions, which evoke an emotional response and are intriguing in an obsessive, intense, and voyeuristic way.
In the works exhibited, Günter Brus also references art history, doing so with romantic poetry, provocative self-exposure, or in the form of the interior monologue; he vexes viewers, inspiring them to reflect on the historical vade mecum populated (as main characters) by figures such as Caspar David Friedrich, William Blake, Carl Spitzweg, Egon Schiele, Alfred Kubin, Oskar Kokoschka.

His image-poems are to be taken as painterly reading pieces, as a congenial amalgamation of visual art and literature or, as Brus puts it, a “coupling of views and ways of thinking”. He is ironical and breaking the laws of formal aesthetics with breathtaking colorfulness. The versatility of Günter Brus’ art work as an action artists, book illustrator, pictorial poet, image-and-language artist, draftsman and painter makes him one of the most important protagonists of 20th century art.
The MAK which in itself is a site of the programmatic fusion of tradition and experiment, the place of a continuous reflection process and a much-noted platform for crossovers thus almost naturally offers itself as an ideal projection surface for Brus’ work.
Born at Ardning, Styria, Günter Brus, graduated from an arts-and-crafts school in Graz and went to Vienna in 1956 to study painting. Impressed by turn-of- the-century German Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism, he started in autumn 1960 doing radically gestural painting, pushing the limits of conventional painting formats. Together with companions such as Otto Muehl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, he moved on in the mid-1960s to establish Viennese Actionism (1964–1970), which reached its provocative culmination point in 1968 in a performance sown at Vienna University and entitled “Art and Revolution”. Denounced as a “fecal artist and public enemy”, Brus was held in custody on remand for two months before he was released and fled into exile in Berlin. From 1970, he started developing a new art form, combining literature and visual art and following upon his action-art work which had always been accompanied by drawings and paintings. This led to the kind of image poems which, starting with a portfolio entitled “Irrwisch”, ushered in a new stage in the artist’s œuvre. In 1996, Günter Brus received the Grand Austrian State Award for Visual Art for his life-work.

The comprehensive show of works which opens on September 10 is presented in cooperation with Heike Curtze Gallery Vienna/Berlin.

Accompanying catalogue: “GÜNTER BRUS. Mitternachtsröte”, edited by Peter Noever, with contributions by Achille Bonito Oliva, Lóránd Hegyi, Olivier Kaeppelin and Peter Noever, 323 pages, French/English/German, MAK Vienna 2008, € 29.

MAK Press Office
Teresa-Maria Raninger phone (+43 1) 711 36 exts. 233, 212, 229 Fax (+43 1) 711 36 227 E-Mail presse@MAK.at

Opening Tuesday, September 9, 2008, 8:00 p.m.

MAK Works on Paper Room
Stubenring 5, A-1010 Vienna
Opening Hours
Tue MAK NITE© 10:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.
Wed–Sun 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m., Mon closed
Admission
€ 9.90 with MAK Guide / € 7.90 / reduced € 5.50
Free Admission on Saturdays©

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