In 2017 the nitsch museum is presenting the exhibition “HERMANN NITSCH – The graphic work”. The focus is on the artist’s prints from the last four decades, which were created in close cooperation with well-known publishers in national and international printing workshops.

During a five-year training programme at the graphic arts school Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna, until 1957 Nitsch had the opportunity to learn printing skills – for example in the areas of lithography and etching. At the same time he already developed the idea for the Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries. In the mid-1960s the artist created the first drawing sketches for an underground theatre architecture where the performances of the Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries would take place. Dealing with this extraordinary architectural approach became the central motif of his prints and shows the clear connection to the complete artwork of Hermann Nitsch.

Cooperating for decades with the publishers Francesco Conz and Fred Jahn led to several graphical motifs on this theme in Italy and Germany. In the Munich printing house Imhof, Fred Jahn commissioned large portfolios which gather together the prints of Hermann Nitsch. Monumental large-scale prints arose.

At the start of the 1990s Nitsch’s print oeuvre gained a new technical dimension when he became acquainted with the printer Kurt Zein. Together they developed the so-called Unikatgrafik (unique graphic arts), where printing is done on paper on which the artist has poured paint by hand beforehand. “Everything Hermann Nitsch does, what he thinks, paints, draws, writes, builds, composes is part of the Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries and gains its meaning from this.”(Wieland Schmied, Ein Kosmos unter der Erde, 1993). Precisely in the spirit of this guiding theme as expressed by Wieland Schmied, the exhibition is presenting the prints in the context of the complete artwork. Together with splatter paintings, performance photos, films and original documents, an entire installation emerges which gives the visitor a perspective insight into the universe of Hermann Nitsch.