“Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz” / Bruseum Graz

Alexander Brener, together with Oleg Kulik, belongs to that generation of Russian performance artists who emerged following the demise of the Soviet Union, and who were already able to operate ‘freely’ in the public arena. Jointly with Kulik, Brener acted as a naked, wild dog, who once bit various curators while chained up. Brener achieved international renown in 1997, when he sprayed a green dollar sign onto Kazimir Malevich’s white painting Suprematism 1920–1927 in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Despite his objection that it was an artistic performance, his protest against corruption and the commercialisation of the art market ended with a two-year prison sentence. Together with his Austrian partner Barbara Schurz, he has not only published a Manifesto of Spitting; also, in recent years, the artists’ duo Brener & Schurz has repeatedly taken as a theme the power strategies and mechanisms of exclusion employed in the art market and in broader society, through performances – some of them fierce. Alongside these, he has created splendidly illustrated books, whose protagonists are apparently leading failed existences, with no place, it seems, in a society dominated by conformist structures. Moreover, Brener is highly regarded as a poet, not only in Russia.