Neue Galerie Graz

• Exhibition

10/2/2025 - 5/10/2026

Extract

Günter Brus has had a lasting influence on international art history with his actions and image poems. The BRUSEUM offers a concentrated insight into his diverse and extensive oeuvre. This is currently limited to the first room.

In addition to rarely seen works from his early informal period, there is documentation of his actions between 1964 and 1970, which established his international reputation as a pioneer of body art.

His break with body art was followed by a turn to drawing – the cut on his own body became a mark on paper once again. The open fusion of word and image, the fluid transition from the written to the drawn, once again reveals the doubly talented artist as an innovator and boundary-breaker.

He understands so-called image poetry as an independent artistic genre at the interface between literature and visual art. The selection from the collection shows the continuities of motifs and working processes in his artistic career spanning more than five decades.

• Artists:
• Günter Brus
• Günter Brus (1938-2024), together with Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, is a co-founder of Viennese Actionism and a pioneer of Body Art. The Austrian painter, graphic artist, and performance artist is among Austria’s most important artists. As a writer, he incorporated literature into his pictorial and graphic work in a completely new way. Brus’s oeuvre has been presented in renowned institutions, including at the Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, in 2006; MACBA, Barcelona, in 2005–06; the Albertina, Vienna, in 2003–04, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1993–94. Günter Brus participated in documenta 7, in 1982, documenta 6, in 1977, documenta 5, in 1972 in Kassel. In 2011 the BRUSEUM, a museum devoted to the artist’s work, opened in the Neue Galerie in Graz.

• Exhibition

4/23/2026 - 10/4/2026

Analytical Beauty

200 Years of Flower Paintings

This exhibition showcases previously unseen floral depictions from the Neue Galerie Graz collection. The exhibition features a variety of motifs, ranging from Biedermeier watercolours and Far Eastern colour woodcuts to contemporary interpretations of floral art. The link between science and art is evident throughout the exhibition, from the systematic pictorial documentation of botany in the form of realistic, detailed plant depictions to the full exploitation of the aesthetic qualities of the floral motif — one of the oldest motifs in art and cultural history.

The emerging natural sciences are particularly evident in the plant depictions of the early 19th century. Interestingly, modern science still favours painted representations of objects because they can reproduce details and contexts much more vividly than photographic processes. However, these depictions' appeal lies in the fact that they stimulate both our 'cool intellect' and our collective 'sense of beauty' in equal measure.

• Exhibition

11/29/2024 - 12/31/2028

Selection

Highlights aus der Sammlung

The Neue Galerie Graz's collection of around 70,000 works has been shown in various ways over the past years, most recently until summer 2024 under the title Show! Highlights from the Collection. Due to the high demand, a permanent presentation of the collection will now be shown, which can be seen in a condensed form under the title Selection. For the first time, the public was actively involved in the new selection; a survey led to an astonishing result, which has been incorporated into the current presentation.

• Artists:
• Gruppenausstellung (unter anderem mit Werken von Egon Schiele, Maria Lassnig, Herbert Boeckl und Susanne Wenger)

• Link:
• Facebook Event