Hermann Nitsch

Works from 1984 - 2021

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The exhibition "Works from 1984–2021" presents nearly twenty carefully selected works by Hermann Nitsch, offering insight into the multifaceted oeuvre of one of Austria's most significant contemporary artists and a leading representative of Viennese Actionism. On display are his characteristic Schüttbilder (pour paintings) on jute and canvas, works on paper, and graphic works spanning several decades of his artistic career.

Among the highlights are rare works from the Leviticus Series, a work on paper created during the 20th Painting Action at the Vienna Secession, and an early painting from the 1980s that already demonstrates the expressive intensity characteristic of Nitsch's visual language. Another key work is the monumental Painter's Smock on Pour Painting (Malhemd auf Schüttbild, 1991), measuring 200 × 300 cm, which vividly illustrates the close relationship between action, the human body, and painting.

Nitsch's work, which simultaneously affirms life while confronting suffering, draws on elements of religious—predominantly Christian—symbolism and liturgy in a deliberately uncompromising manner in order to emphasize the immediacy of sensory experience. Blood (that of the Son of God) and the cross, for example, recur throughout his paintings and painting actions. The painter's smock applied to the canvas recalls the iconographically significant tradition of Christ's blood- and sweat-soaked burial shroud. His paintings and graphic works are inseparable from the ritual act of their creation and cannot be fully understood independently of that performative process.

From the early 2000s onward, Nitsch increasingly worked with acrylic and oil paint, while the use of blood as a painting medium gradually receded into the background.