Hermann Nitsch.
Orgies Mysteries Theater – Retrospective November 30, 2006 - January 22, 2007
Martin-Gropius-Bau

Honoring Hermann Nitsch with a representative exhibition at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin has been a long-held wish. With its 18 rooms, the Martin Gropius Building offers a good architectural basis for presenting the artist's great work.

Hermann Nitsch (born in Lower Austria in 1938) has created a versatile and uncompromising work, it goes beyond the canon of the usual understanding of art and the critical and highly fruitful debate about Nitsch's painting has always taken place in connection with the Orgies-Mysteries Theater (OMTheater). . A utopian theater project that he has been performing since the early 1960s and is still the basis of his oeuvre, which is based on a total work of art, the painting action and the action of the OMTheatre are mutually dependent.

The first experimental action took place in Vienna in December 1962 and lasted around 30 minutes. A man was chained to the wall, as if crucified. He was covered with a white robe and Nitsch poured blood over the chained man's face. The blood dripped onto the robe. The way in which paint (or blood) was applied to a base, free-flowing paint from top to bottom, is a method that Nitsch used to create numerous “pouring paintings” in the following years.

He also uses this method of letting things flow and incorporating chance into the pictures that he works on with a broom and brush. This attitude arises from Tachism and the entire “objectless” art of post-war modernism, in whose tradition Nitsch has always been involved.

His theatrical performances simultaneously became more complex and sophisticated over the years, lambs and bulls hung on crosses are gutted, music and various materials are added. Potentially there are no limits; The actions now take place in large halls or in Prinzendorf Castle, where Nitsch has lived and worked since 1971.

Due to the fixed repertoire of action sequences in the OMTheatre, the pouring and rolling images show great similarities and do not reveal any fundamental change. The limitation to several basic colors in such a large-scale exhibition shows that the works are not primarily concerned with originality of representation, nor with the search for a specific form or symbolic elements, but rather the repetition of something that essentially remains the same Action schemes give room for a wealth of coincidences. At the beginning of the exhibition there will be the “Altar of Existence” from 1960, which represents a point of intersection, so to speak. Followed by 9 “Stations of the Cross”, these images, each 6 m to 9 m long, run through the exhibition as a leitmotif and are borrowed from private collections and museum collections in Germany and Austria. A highlight will be the “Hostage Wall” from the Museum Ludwig. The “Asolo Room” from 1973 and the “Schömer Room” from 1998 from the Essl Collection will also be reconstructed for the exhibition.

This is followed by rooms with “photo documentation” that represent a separate creative area, early actions are shown on screens, scores, drawings and a music room take up a wide area.

An exhibition with Hermann Nitsch will also be of great interest to a younger generation of artists and attract an audience. The recently rediscovered interest in performative art makes Hermann Nitsch and early actionism appear extremely relevant again, and with this ambitious exhibition the spectrum of Nitsch's art could achieve a new relevance and dimension.