Hermann Nitsch

Hermann Nitsch (b. 1938, Vienna, Austria; d. 2022, Mistelbach, Austria) lived and worked at Schloss Prinzendorf on the Zaya River in Lower Austria. A co-founder of the Viennese Aktionism movement, Hermann Nitsch was instrumental in reforming the face of 1960s art, eschewing the illusionary boundaries of traditional painting and sculpture and reinventing an art that existed in real, physical, and violent terms.

Hermann Nitsch was celebrated and reviled in equal measure for taking on the semblance of pagan ceremony and incorporating robed processions, symbolic crucifixions, drunken excess, nudity, animal sacrifice, the drinking of blood, and the ritual incorporation of guts and entrails. To this day, his audiences are not mere visitors, but active participants in his artistic liturgies.

Hermann Nitsch’s work draws parallels between religion and the ritualistic spiritualism of creativity. Heavily steeped in ancient philosophy and a dissident, questioning Christian theology, he actively seeks catharsis through pain and compassion, a rigorously disciplined quest for ethereal release and enlightenment through an embrace of primal instinct and ancient sacrament.

Nitsch's works are exhibited in the two Nitsch Museums in Mistelbach and Naples, as well as in the Nitsch Foundation in Vienna, and can be found in the permanent collections of major international museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Tate (London), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich), and many others.