HERMANN NITSCH

Born in 1938 in Vienna, Austria
Lives and works in Prinzendorf, Austria

Hermann Nitsch is a founding member of the Viennese Actionist movement, together with Günter Brus, Otto Muehl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler in the sixties. In reaction to the oppressive context of the World War II aftermath in Vienna, he found a way of expressing himself through cathartic gestures at their most raw and uncensored. He initiated his work with the Orgies Mysteries Theatre, a six days long event originally staged in the sixties, intended as a new form of total art where all the senses were to be stimulated. It consisted of performances involving the sacrificial butchering of animals and tied up, naked participants covered in blood. This practice looks into the universal language of ritual ceremonies. The splashing of fluids and other various viscera led him to produce Painting Actions from the sixties to this day. In these paintings, the process, i.e. the performance, fuels the result, as in Reliktmontage in which he reworked the relics of a performance on canvas. Nitsch’s painting goal is, in his own words, to “immerse oneself in the most sensitive perceptual intensity.”