Exhibitions

‘I wanted to become a church painter,’ Hermann Nitsch once said about himself. He did not become a church painter – but the sacred forms the innermost core of his world-famous Gesamtkunstwerk, the Orgien Mysterien Theater. Since his first theoretical drafts in 1957, Nitsch has understood religious rituals of all cultures as sensual, symbolically condensed forms that lead into the depths of human existence. Chalices, crosses, monstrances and liturgical colours are not mere references for him, but carriers of an existential experience.

Growing up in Catholic Vienna in the 1940s and 1950s, Nitsch recognised early on that the sensuality of these rites – their physicality, their smells, colours, sounds – was in danger of disappearing in modern society. His Orgien Mysterien Theater (Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries) was intended to bring back this intensity: a space in which life can be experienced in all its extremes – joy and pain, birth and death, overwhelm and liberation.

The exhibition ‘Hermann Nitsch. From Sunrise Onwards’ is dedicated to this sensual dimension of his work. Paintings in liturgical colours, landscape photographs, videos and sound elements combine to create an atmospheric space of experience. Nature – the Weinviertel region, the light, the elements – becomes the central setting: in the 6-Day Play, the most comprehensive project of the O.M. Theatre, each phase begins ‘from sunrise’. It is nature itself that determines the rhythm of this work.

Nitsch understood his theatre as an aesthetic ritual of existence. The festival becomes drama, the drama becomes catharsis. The world is to be accepted – in its beauty and cruelty, its possibilities for happiness and its abysses. The goal is a state of heightened perception, a mystical condensation of one's own existence, which intensifies into a comprehensive sense of being alive.

The exhibition shows rarely presented works, including landscape videos recorded by Nitsch himself, and invites visitors to understand the Orgien Mysterien Theater not as provocation, but as a visionary attempt to make the existential depth of life experienceable anew.

Curator: Julia Moebus-Puck M.A.