Hermann Nitsch. Body-Sacred-Myth

It was the year 1975 when, in his Prinzendorf Castle, Hermann Nitsch (Wien, 1938 - Mistelbach, 2022) directed Aktion no. 50: a performance in which a naked man, blindfolded, staged the sacrifice of the Crucifixion, exposing his body to the pain of the world, which is the pain of God become man to save him from negation and oblivion.
Fifty years later, the Diocesan Museum of Brescia investigates the intense relationship between the body and the sacred dimension - an indispensable paradigm for understanding the research of the Father of Viennese Actionism - through the exhibitionHERMANN NITSCH Body-Sacred-Myth.

Curated by Ilaria Bignotti, in collaboration with the Nitsch Foundation in Wien and the IAGA Contemporary Art gallery in Cluj-Napoca, the exhibition hosts a selection of large-scale works, in which iconographic references to mystical and religious themes meet the languages of the Informal, whose genesis has to do with the desire to expiate the violence perpetrated by the 20th-century dictatorships that had dragged the world into an international conflict of heinous shame.
The invitation, more pertinent than ever in a geopolitical context continually on the point of deflagration, is to look straight into the abyss - to remember so as not to repeat - held by the hand of art.

1975 - 2025. DRAMA - LITURGY - EXPIATON
Like a refined anthology, the exhibition encompasses more than forty years of the artist's research, from 1975 to 2017, from the vintage photograph of the Prinzendorf passion-crucifixion, to the large canvases on which the artist worked in the last years of his life, including many that he titled Relikt, relict: rests of a consumed tragedy that humanity has a responsibility to continue to remember.
Examples are Untitled/Action shirt (2004), a red-soaked smock worn during a performance, Relict with Applications (2008), a collage on canvas composed of a red chasuble, liturgical stoles, plasters and gauze smeared with red fluid, Tissue Relict (1998), blood on linen canvas and St. Lucia 77. Blood. Victim. Operation (1977) made with stole, gauze and acrylic paint.
Tangible traces of Nitsch's concerted artistic liturgies, the works become a monument (literally, a place of remembrance and memory) of an event - the Passion, the Holocaust, the War - that passed through earthly sacrifice and violence. Just as Jackson Pollock experimented with the expansive power of dripping matter through dripping, so Nitsch staged rituals of collective catharsis, exposing surfaces to the pictorial action of dripping blood and colour matter.

Even in the absence of red colour, the graphic sign is no less dramatic.
The Crucifixion is the subject of a 1983 work, a silkscreen print on an original shipwreck, where the stroke is feverish and contorted; the same happens in the two architectural drawings with the Cross at the centre of intricate pastel labyrinths, and in the Conquest of Jerusalem, a monumental three-metre-wide silkscreen print on an original 1971 relict, completed by Nitsch in 2017 during a performance. In the imposing three-metre Deposition (2006-2007), the scene of the deposed Christ is silhouetted against tangles of forms evoking bodily entrails, while in The Last Supper (1983, silkscreen print on an original relict from 1976-1979) bodies meticulously described in their skeletal and anatomical parts are arranged along the almost four-metre length of the composition.

TO BRING THE PAST INTO THE PRESENT, IN ORDER NOT TO FORGET: WIENER ACTIONISM
In the context of a Europe recovering from the Second World War, Wiener Actionism was born in the early 1960s as a reaction by some Austrian artists who did not accept how the politics of their time had removed the memory of the violence perpetrated by the dictatorships just over fifteen years earlier.
While everywhere else in the world, the artistic and intellectual community was wondering how to deal with the complexity of such a profound ethical laceration, in Austria, guilty of having made a pact with National Socialism, the answer was an artistic movement that aimed to shake up consciences narcotized by the economic and media boom. Hermann Nitsch, with the other exponents of Viennese Actionism, re-enacted what had been most harassed and denied - the body on which the drama of pain was inscribed - in order to remind a people who had to feel guilty of racial hatred and the silence in which the extermination of millions of innocents had taken place, of their civic responsibility.

HERMANN NITSCH (Wien, 1938 – Mistelbach, 2022)
One of the most complex contemporary artists, Hermann Nitsch was the founder of Wiener Actionism, together with Günter Brus, Otto Muehl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
A 1958 graduate of the Wiener Experimental Graphic Institute, his early paintings mixed expressionist echoes with Biblical and spiritual subjects. He looks at Michelangelo and Caravaggio, Rembrandt and El Greco, Van Gogh and Eduard Munch, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, early Kandinsky and Oskar Kokoschka. He drifted into the Informal with lumps, drips and stains predominantly in shades of red, until, as Nitsch himself told Danielle Spera during a long conversation, on the wall of his mother's appartment he painted an abstract painting dedicated to the theme of transubstantiation. Today, that work, titled Brot und Wein (Bread and Wine), an open scenery on the most important mystery of the Catholic faith, a flow of blood-red paint, is part of the American Glenston collection. It was the beginning of an evolution of a quest in which painting would become action, while colour was dispensed from being mere tonality, to be elevated to substance. At the same time, he started his first theatrical experiments, in which one can trace echoes of Antonin Artaud's lesson and of Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, and the consequent involvement of the viewer.... read the rest of the article»