Günter Brus is an Austrian artist known for his controversial films, performances, and paintings. He was notably a member of the Viennese Actionist Group alongside Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch. “Pure painting or the art of drawing whose point of departure is based on purely formal criteria is, in my opinion, passé,” he has said. Born on September 27, 1938 in Ardning, Austria, he studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Graz before transferring to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1960, the artist’s interest in the paintings of Jackson Pollock led his transition into making performance-based paintings regarding his own body. Many of the Viennese Actionist’s radical acts were intended as reactions to what...