1938, Vienna Austria2022, Mistelbach, Austria A crucial founder of Viennese Actionism, Hermann Nitsch is regarded as one of the most versatile modern artists, aligning painting, performance, set design and music in his practice. Through an interdisciplinary synthesis of creative expression, he became a pioneer of the avant-garde scene in the Austrian capital, thereby calling on all five senses for a holistic experience of art. From an initial focus on Expressionism and religious figurative scenes during the 1950s, Nitsch turned to Art Informel at the beginning of the 1960s, before radically breaking with any iconographic traditions. Increasingly, the process of painting moved to the centre of his creative preoccupation, led by the idea of the performative action as an intensive sensory enactment. In a kind of religious-ritual staging, various substances and fluids became part of his expansive approach, conceived as the ‘Orgies Mysteries Theatre‘. Noise and screaming feature in his ‘abreaction plays‘, performances that later entailed action paintings by splattering liquids onto canvas. Graphic prints began to complement his oeuvre in the 1970s, examinations of the labyrinthine makeup of the human body which Nitsch described as “the architecture of the Orgies Mysteries Theatre“. The purchase of the Prinzendorf Castle in Lower Austria in 1971 allowed Nitsch to realise his musical ideas for his large-scale operatic actions where he began to interpret life as a passion. Staged as total works of art, he projected his ‘Orgies Mysteries Theatre‘ as aesthetic rituals where the dismemberment of taboos sat at the heart of a rupture with visual conventions. The 1980s and 1990s subsequently witnessed a series of performative plays that extended over the course of several days alongside the cycle of pour paintings aimed at a novel grammar of art. Hermann Nitsch has had solo and group exhibitions at Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), MARe Museum (Budapest), Museum Jorn (Silkeborg), Musée de l‘Orangerie (Paris), K&L Museum (Gyeonggi), Umberto Benappi (Turin), Pace Gallery (NY), Museum of Decorative Arts and Design (Riga), Bundestkunsthalle (Bonn), Park Museum (Singapore), Armory Show (New York), Museum Villa Stuck (Munich), mumok (Vienna), Fondazione Ducci (Rome), Ernst Museum (Budapest), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Martin-Gropius Bau (Berlin), Slought Foundation (Philadelphia) His works can be found in various public and private collections, including among others MoMA (NY), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Hammer Museum (LA), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Station Museum of Contemporary Art (Houston), Tate Gallery (London), Musée Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Castello di Rivoli (Rivoli), GAM (Turin), Museo di Capodimonte (Naples), MART (Rovereto), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Museum Brandhorst (Munich), Nationalgalerie Berlin (Berlin), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), mumok (Vienna), Österreichische Galerie Belvedere (Vienna), Rupertinum (Salzburg), Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern)