Exhibitions

“I wanted to become a church painter,” said Hermann Nitsch. The sacred forms the core of his Orgies Mysteries Theater. Since 1957, he understood religious rituals as sensual concentrations of existential experience. Liturgical colors, crosses, and monstrances in his work are not quotations but expressions of a radical artistic ambition: to make life in all its extremes tangible.

The exhibition focuses on Nitsch’s sacred visual language from the early 1970s onward. “Sacred” here means the sum of the entire experience of being. Paintings, landscape recordings, videos, and sound merge into an atmospheric space of experience in which temporality, nature, and intensity become centrally perceptible. The nature of the Weinviertel becomes a resonant space for the work.

The visual and acoustic dramaturgy of the exhibition is defined by the gradient of liturgical colors – red, orange, yellow, white, black, green, and violet. Two chapel spaces – a room of silence and a room of landscape containing four videos recorded by Nitsch himself with a handheld camera – complete the exhibition. The show is complemented by visual poems by Heinz Cibulka.

In the 6-Day-Play, the most comprehensive project of the Orgies Mysteries Theater, each phase begins “from sunrise onwards” – nature determines the rhythm. The exhibition presents the Orgies Mysteries Theater as a visionary attempt to make existential depth newly accessible.

The exhibition features rarely presented works, including Nitsch’s own landscape videos, and invites visitors to understand the Orgies Mysteries Theater not as provocation but as a visionary attempt to render the existential depth of life newly experienceable.

The exhibition was created in cooperation with the Wiener Aktionismus Museum.
Curator: Julia Moebus-Puck, M.A., Director of Collections at the Wiener Aktionismus Museum.

The catalogue for the exhibition "Hermann Nitsch. from sunrise on" is available for €24.90 in the online shop or at the museum ticket desk.