Hermann Nitsch, born in Vienna in 1938, died in Mistelbach (where he lived and worked) in April 2022, is considered an important artist of the Vienna Action Movement, of which he was a co-founder. An internationally recognized master of Austrian performance, the artist developed a powerfully expressive body of work that used religious dramaturgy to develop a Gesamtkunst that culminated every year since the 1950s in his "Orgien Mysterien Theater", where he invited friends and audiences to six days of festivities and performances.
In the last years of his career, Hermann Nitsch developed a painting of great vivacity, always more colorful, always closely linked to his performative actions and the places where he intervenes. Fascinated by Monet's Water Lilies, to which he paid homage at the Musée de l'Orangerie during each of his stays in Paris, the Viennese artist was invited before his death to enter into dialogue with this masterpiece of Impressionism, whose proximity he emphasized as he was confronted with the problems of his own practice: "In my performances, my expressive and religious painting has become a consummate drama, an analytical dramaturgy." What remains to be seen is a frenzy of colors and forms that reaches far beyond the content, like the ecstasies of color in Monet's Water Lilies " (in 2022, in an interview with Sarah Imatte, Heritage Curator at the Orangerie Museum).
If Nitsch did not have time to realize his project for the Musée de l'Orangerie, the museum wanted to pay tribute to him a year after his death in the form of this counterpoint, which brings together a series of paintings and graphic works created shortly before his death, selected directly from the artist's studio. They will be installed in the "Pronaos" room of the Nymphéas as well as in the contemporary space on level -2 of the museum.
October 11, 2023 to February 12, 2024
