Dominik Steiger, the man of letters, poet, musician, performer, illustrator, painter, collagist, photographer and bricoleur, would have turned 80 in October 2020. The BRUSEUM is devoting a retrospective exhibition to this artist who died too young, received too little recognition and was too readily overlooked. The focus will be on his performative works and drawings.
In and around the Vienna Group he discovered literature, in the atmosphere surrounding the Viennese actionists art, and in the circle influenced by Joseph Beuys and Dieter Roth open-minded experimentation. Playing with dilettantism, flirting with the naïve, disrespecting the established, experimentation as a principle and the design as a programme – all these elements characterise the creative output of Dominik Steiger.
The exhibition in the BRUSEUM is only logical, for it was Günter Brus who was the first to publish, in the Schastrommel 12, his attempts at symbols called ‘biometric texts’. It was with Brus that he writes and draws his first ‘Zwoman’ (a blend of drawing and novel) in 1974, titled Jeden jeden Mittwoch (Every every Wednesday), and he likewise shares with Brus not only a penchant for obsessive drawing, but also the passion for language games and new word-creations.
The BRUSEUM exhibition gathers together the most important works from Steiger’s extensive output, showing not only the developments and threads of traditions in his highly varied and rhizomatic oeuvre, but his numerous collaborations, too.
