To mark Günter Brus’ 80^th birthday, the BRUSEUM is showing a world-first exhibition of his Actionist drawings. The jubilee is also an occasion to present the first part of a catalogue of works that is planned over many years. Founded in 2008, the BRUSEUM is not only a museum for Günter Brus; it is also conceived crucially as a centre of expertise concerning, and research into, the artist’s oeuvre.

In the 1960s Günter Brus placed his body at the centre of his art. In the drawings that prepared, accompanied and built upon his Actions, he reveals himself as a brutally tortured and mutilated individual. The ‘body analyses’, as he calls his later Actions, find their execution in drawing form in the multiple penetration and vivisection of his body, in lines that are as sharp as they are unsparing, reminding one of cuts made by a razor. The show As if with the Scalpel is the first time these ‘Actionist drawings’ have been gathered on their own, their intensity and their existential and political power remaining undiminished in currency and potency 50 years after their execution.

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