Brus grew up in Mureck, attended the Kunstgewerbeschule Graz and went to Vienna in 1956, where he studied painting and met his lifelong friend Alfons Schilling.
Brus was a co-founder in 1964 of Viennese Actionism (German: Wiener Aktionismus) with Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
Sentenced to six months in prison after the event and subsequent public reactions, he fled to Berlin with his family and returned to Austria in 1976.
In 1966 he participated in the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London with fellow artists Gustav Metzger, Otto Muehl, Wolf Vostell, Yoko Ono, and others.
The Joanneum now houses a permanent gallery, called the Bruseum, featuring the work of Brus and fellow Viennese Actionists.
Kurt Flecker, then cultural advisor for Styria, laid the foundation stone for his own Brus Museum in 2008 with a collection purchase for the Neue Galerie Graz.
The "BRUSEUM", which opened on 26 November 2011 at the new location of the Neue Galerie Graz in the Joanneumsviertel, is designed as a permanent high-profile exhibition space.
September, Die Blumen des Bösen, Strangulation, Psycho-Dramolett, Kunst und Revolution, Osmose, Einatmen – Ausatmen, Handlung, Zerreißprobe, Selbstbemalung, and Wiener Spaziergang), directed by, among others, Kurt Kren, Hans Christof Stenzel, Peter Gorsen, Ernst Schmidt Jr., Helmut Kronberger, Werner Schulz, and Otto Muehl, as well as by Brus himself and his wife Anni Brus, compiled and presented in a documentary format by Peter Kasperak, with a total running length of 82 minutes in a limited edition of a thousand hand-numbered copies under the title Körperanalysen: Aktionen 1964–1970.
The loneliness of a late classic, W&K - Wienerroither & Kohlbacher, Vienna, Austria 2018: Unruhe nach dem Sturm - Günter Brus, Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austria 2011: Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960, MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA 2010: Ruptures and Continuities: Photography Made after 1960 from the MFAH Collection, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA 2006: Primal Secretions: A Günter Brus Retrospective, Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, USA 2006: Into Me/Out of Me, P.S.1.