Two major solo exhibitions are planned for 2024 at the nitsch museum Mistelbach. The Italian-British artist Andrea Cusumano, a former assistant to Nitsch and long-time musical director of the Orgien Mysterien Theater, whose work was strongly influenced by Hermann Nitsch, will kick things off. The exhibition "Andrea Cusumano - Spatial Dramaturgy" will open on March 2, 2024, in cooperation with the Italian Council (XI Edition, 2022), an international support program for Italian art under the direction of the "Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity" of the Italian Ministry of Culture. Works and installations by Hermann Nitsch will continue to be on permanent display in the crypt and the side hall of the museum.
From June 9, 2024, the museum will be showing a juxtaposition of Hermann Nitsch and the Danish artist Asger Jorn, a member of the COBRA Group. The exhibition is curated by Florian Steininger, Artistic Director of the Kunsthalle Krems. At the same time, a solo exhibition by Hermann Nitsch can be seen at the Asger Jorn Museum in Silkeborg/Denmark.
Andrea Cusumano Spatial dramaturgy
Retrospective 1993-2023
Andrea Cusumano (born 1973) is an international multimedia artist, performer, composer, painter, director, dramaturge, author, curator and art director of Italian-British origin.
Andrea Cusumano is not only an award-winning Italian artist, but was also a student and later assistant of Hermann Nitsch and musical director of the Orgien Mysterien Theater. He taught "Performance Art" at the renowned Goldsmiths University in London, was a councillor for culture in Palermo, director of Manifesta 12 and founder and artistic director of BAM - Biennale Arcipelago Mediterraneo, Palermo.
Andrea Cusomano © Faust Brigantino
His work makes use of different media and moves across borders between several individual disciplines of art. All these components necessarily complement each other and form a coherent intermedial work construct. His work - the artist likes to talk about his experiments and research in this context - focuses on the dramaturgical potential of objects and spaces. Cusumano ultimately creates theater-referenced spatial dramaturgies. Their central themes range from death and transcendence to a possible catharsis that art can actually trigger.
The art experiment is complex and multi-layered, conceptually based on and related to the work of Hermann Nitsch, but at the same time it is independent, it speaks a significant language and impresses in a very special way. The performative component creates stage dramaturgies and panel paintings, intermedia installations, intense fragments of thought and memory. Cusumano gives us real events in dramaturgically constructed spaces, spaces without time, spaces without place. This work could also be described as a "laboratory for intermediality and existential dramaturgies".
March 3 to May 20, 2024
Exhibition Jorn - Nitsch © Jorn Museum
Jorn - Nitsch
Jorn - Nitsch is the first exhibition at the nitsch museum in which Hermann Nitsch's artistic work is juxtaposed with a second position. Alongside Karel Appel and Pierre Alechinsky, Asger Jorn (1914 Vejrum - Aarhus 1973, Denmark) is one of the best-known protagonists of the CoBrA group, one of the leading avant-garde movements of the post-war period in Europe, which advocated originality and freedom in art. At the same time, Hermann Nitsch will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Museum Jorn, Silkeborg.
The greatest similarities between the two artists can be found in the mythical-cultic and gestural-material aspects of their painting. Asger Jorn thematizes Nordic culture, the "vandalic" in the form of archaic paintings, drawings and sculptures. Jorn's artistic exploration of the Celtic in the Northern European cultural sphere of prehistory forms a bridge to the neighboring MAMUZ Museum in Mistelbach. Nitsch delves into the spiritual Dionysian world of intoxication, ecstasy, eroticism, pain, destruction and ultimately resurrection. Protestant north meets catholic-baroque Weinviertel.
Jorn's and Nitsch's painting is characterized by sensual power, physical commitment and materiality. With his action paintings and Schüttbilder from the early 1960s onwards, the Viennese actionist decisively expanded the panel painting and defined it as a precursor to his Orgien Mysterien Theater. Above all, his late painterly work is filled with gestural discharges of impasto materiality and strong coloration. Jorn draws from the unconscious beyond the rational world and creates hybrid-organic form overgrowths that dissolve into an abstract painting substance.
A further parallel can be found in the use of drawing and the primacy of the line, whether Jorn's archaic-childlike cephalopods and human-animal creations or Nitsch's anatomically and organically influenced architectural notations in his graphic work.
From June 9, 2024
