Actionist Günter Brus died

Gallerist Philipp Konzett, co-initiator and managing director of the Vienna Actionism Museum, which will open in March, confirmed corresponding reports to the APA on Sunday morning.

Brus, born on September 27, 1938 in Ardning in Upper Styria, together with Muehl, Nitsch and Schwarzkogler, shocked the public in the 1960s with body art that became world-famous as Viennese Actionism. “Günter Brus was the only one of the four actionists who carried out his actions on himself. He went to his personal limits in order to show psychopathological dimensions,” said Konzett, who was deeply affected.

After Brus was sentenced to months in prison in Austria for an art event at Vienna University, he fled to Berlin in 1969 with his wife and child, from where he only returned in 1979. Brus was one of the most important contemporary Austrian artists and created a work that broke boundaries in many ways.

Since autumn 2011, his own museum in Graz, the Bruseum, has been dedicated to him. For his artistic work, Brus has received, among others, the Great Austrian State Prize for Fine Arts (1996) and the Oskar Kokoschka Prize (2003). Most recently he lived with his daughter Diana and his wife Anna on the northern outskirts of Graz.