BRUSEUM / Neue Galerie Graz

With his 1970 Acid Test (Zerreißprobe), Brus ends his period of actionism and starts creating a body of drawn and literary work that encompasses tens of thousands of sheets. As a transitional work, he produces the text-image volume Mad Wisp (Irrwisch).

This consists of anarchic floods of language, cascading rhymes, neologisms, corny jokes, and nonsense which dismiss any stringency of content and re-tellability and are counterpointed by destructive and disturbing drawings. At a time when hints at an upheaval in his creative work appear—whose direction and impact he senses rather than knows—Brus is confronted with the work of an artist-poet whose erratic work becomes his inspiration and guide: William Blake. For Brus, Blake’s “illuminated manuscripts” became the model and legitimation for his own manuscripts, as he still called his picture-poems in the 1970s.

The exhibition, devoted for the first time exclusively to Brus’s picture-poems, shows the process of creation and diversity of this genre developed by the artist from the early 1970s to the present day.