Leben in Farbe

Hermann Nitsch

Info: In cooperation with Jahn und Jahn Munich, SCHÖNEWALD presents an exhibition featuring the impressive painterly oeuvre of Hermann Nitsch with a selection of works from the past thirty years. With his Orgies Mysteries Theatre, the Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch created a Gesamtkunstwerk that combines painting and drawing, as well as musical and performative components, to engage all the senses and intensify the experience and perception of being. Inspired by gestural Informel painting, Nitsch first realised the basic ideas of his Gesamtkunstwerk on the two-dimensional picture surface in the late 1950s, before breaking away from this a short time later with his performative action theatre and the use of real substances and bodies and expanding his theatre into the event space. Since then, painting has been the starting point of his entire oeuvre and an elementary component of all aspects of the Orgies Mysteries Theatre. For Nitsch, the colour substance and the physical handling of this as matter were the main focus of interest. He understood the act of painting as a psychoanalytical process, which was primarily based on physical-sensual exertion. To this end, the colours were passionately spilled, splattered, and smeared onto the canvas. Between 1960 and 1979, the artist focused on the colour red in analogy to the substance of blood, and from the 1980s onwards turned once again to the entire colour spectrum.