Marina Abramovic "In my career I have felt a lot of loneliness, depression and shame"
Hermann Nitsch, an Austrian artist remembered for his
extreme
performance and
body art work,
died Monday at the age of 84.
His legacy is wide and includes music, fashion and scenery, but Nitsch's name will be identified, above all, by
his paintings with blood, viscera and meat
.
There are astonishing images that are forever associated with the Austrian artist: the high walls of Vienna's Secession Pavilion
drenched in blood red
after a probably grueling
action painting
session .
crucified men.
Staging that reproduce torture sessions... The avant-garde art of the 70s was like that.
Actually, Nitsch made his debut in the 1950s, in the context of Viennese Actionism, a movement that challenged any aesthetic tradition of European art and that turned the memory of the avant-garde into
theatrical, sensory, bloody and violent actions
.
At that time, the artist founded the Theater of Orgies and Mysteries, the name with which he encompassed a series of
performances
in which there was already blood, viscera and other organic fluids.
Hermann Nitsch.GEORG HOCHMUTH
'I expected a direct sensory experience from my audience.
The works had specific instructions for viewers to taste, smell, look, listen and touch.
We delivered meat, organ meats, and fruit to the audience for them to touch and feel.
We spread odours, burned incense and other materials, poured
blood, fuel, vinegar, milk, urine, gasoline, turpentine, ammonia and hot water
all over the stage... The Theater of Orgies and Mysteries consisted of all this, overcoming language Nitsch wrote in his biography.
Nitsch, at the Vienna Secession Pavilion, in 1987
If anyone sees a vampire figure in Nitsch, there's more: In 1971, Hermann Nitsch bought
Prinzendorf Castle
in Lower Austria, near the Czech border.
The Catholic Church sold him the place, which became his artistic laboratory.
In Prinzendorf, the artist developed above all his career as
a musical composer, also extreme
.
Nitsch's music is made up of shapeless noises, anguished choruses, and digitally amplified and warped sounds.
Pewron Nitsch must be thought of as an incomprehensible madman.
Two museums are named after him in Italy and Austria and the Nitsch Foundation is based in Vienna.
Throughout his career, he has exhibited his works at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Macba in Barcelona, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm;
the Leopold and Albertina museums in Vienna.
His
performances
by him have been staged in Vienna, New York, London, Havana, and Leipzig, among other cities.
One more image serves to understand the importance of Nitsch: the portrait of Placido Domingo, dressed in a white tunic soaked in blood in the performance of a
Herodiade,
at the Vienna State Opera, in 1995.
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