GENEVA.- Petra Seiser presents a focused selection of drawings and works on paper by Günter Brus (*1938 - †2024), spanning the formative decades of his practice from 1960 through the 1980s, alongside a small group of late works. n recent years, the market has shown sustained and growing interest in Brus’s early works, particularly the informelle drawings. Strong auction results have contributed to a reassessment of this period, both artistically and financially.

Following Brus’s passing in 2024 and his retrospective at Kunsthaus Bregenz, attention to this early phase has further intensified among collectors and institutions who had previously focused primarily on his Aktionist performances.

The presentation opens with Brus’s earliest informelle drawings from 1960–62, which mark the very beginning of his artistic development and predate his Aktionist performances. These works are historically significant, revealing Brus’s early engagement with gesture, materiality, and abstraction at a moment when his visual language was first taking shape.

In recent years, the market has shown growing interest in Brus’s early works, particularly his informelle drawings, which have achieved strong auction results. These works have reached prices in the 100,000–250,000€ range, representing exceptional valuations for works on paper by an Austrian postwar artist and signaling a broader reassessment of Brus’s early output, both artistically and financially. Following Brus’s passing in 2024 and the comprehensive retrospective at Kunsthaus Bregenz, interest in this early phase has further intensified among collectors and institutions who had previously focused primarily on his Aktionist period.

After breaking with his Aktionist performances in the early 1970s, Brus developed his concept of Bild-Dichtung (image-poetry) inspired by William Blake’s "Illuminated Manuscripts”. Here, drawing and text coexist without illustrating one another. Often conceived as small narrative sequences of multiple sheets—frequently with a title page resembling a book cover—these works unfold across a series of images, reading visually much like a poetic or literary structure.

Single works from the 1980s demonstrate how Brus continued to refine this dialogue between image and language, arriving at a more distilled and autonomous visual language. These works show a mature synthesis of drawing, writing, and composition, while remaining rooted in the experimental impulses of his earlier practice.

Working directly with the Brus Estate, we will also present a small selection of late watercolours made between 2020 - 24, shortly before the artist’s death. These intimate works offer a quiet yet poignant counterpoint to the early drawings, bringing the presentation to a reflective close. The works often contain a single image with a word or short phrase that complements or contradicts the image.