LAKE WORTH, FLORIDA.- The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art (PBICA) presents the first US solo museum show of Austrian artist Günter Brus. The exhibition will be on view through June 16, 2002. It will be shown in the mezzanine galleries.
PBICA exhibits extraordinary performance photographs from this artist's early period and several drawings and paintings from the 1980's until the present in which Brus explores personal and societal issues in an Expressionist-inspired style.
"Günter Brus has influenced generations of performance artists to this present day" says PBICA Director and Curator of the exhibition, Michael Rush. "His work is echoed in Paul McCarthy, Chris Burden, Matthew Barney and many, many other contemporary artists. Brus was known for his 'extreme' bodily performances, but his work was also remarkably beautiful as the photographs in this exhibition make clear."
One of the "Viennese Actionists" in the late 60's and early 70's, Brus's work has had a profound influence on subsequent generations of performance and media artists. Brus was born in 1938 in Ardning Austria. After attending the School of Arts and Crafts from 1954-58, he spent two years at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna leaving there in 1960 to pursue abstract expressive painting.
After spending a miserable time as a draftee in the Austrian military, Brus, attempting to re-establish himself as a painter, and wanting to make his own response to the dominant "Informel" painters (a type of Abstract Expressionism), decided to bind his hands and legs when painting in order to obliterate any sense of "gesture" or, much less, "composition" in his work. Thus, the Ana series, named for his wife, became an enactment of his own struggle with painting, even avant-garde painting. Tied in knots, which he forcefully escapes from, ending up stripped bare and powerless on the floor, Brus performs the battle of the artist in his studio, bound by tradition, but yearning to break free with the only instrument he has: his body.
As Brus's actions gained in intensity, so did his preoccupation with sexual and physical taboos largely in response to the repressive social structures he and many others of his generation felt. In Body Analyses the context shifted from the artistic to the social as Brus inveighed against Vienna and the "municipal sewer brigade of the Sigmund Freud City," as he described it, recalling in lengthy rants and raves the outcries of the despondent and psychotic Vaslav Nijinsky. Brus, unlike the psychotic, however, was always keenly aware of the poetic basis of his declarations. Language and action became the tools of his protests.
Brus shocked with full force in 1968 in Action No. 33 performed at Vienna University as part of a symposium on Art and Revolution. Not at all amused with his actions on stage, a judge sentenced him to six months in jail for degrading state symbols. Rather than serve, Brus fled with his family to Berlin. While in Germany, short actions followed until 1970 when, with Action No. 43, he performed his last: "self-injury, rattling sounds in the throat, strangulations, flogging, spastic behavior, and so forth (yield to) an abrupt stop ...and a comforting conflict solution." He and his body had had enough. He was now thirty-two and eager to return to painting and writing.
His later work has taken the form of "Image-Poems," as he calls them: paintings which incorporate figures, texts and vivid colors. More than a dozen of these paintings will be included in the exhibition along with several dozen documentary photographs.
