Gesamtkunstwerk
The Laboratory of the Senses
The Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee, in collaboration with the Fondazione Morra and as part of the Fondazione Donnaregina’s Cultural Actions – Progetto XXI programme, presents Gesamtkunstwerk. The Laboratory of the Senses at the Hermann Nitsch Museum, curated by Giuseppe Morra and Massimo Maiorino, on view from 27 February to 31 July 2026 at the Hermann Nitsch Museum.
For the first time, the exhibition reassembles a fundamental nucleus of the museum’s collection within its full conceptual and perceptual unity. It does so through a newly conceived installation structured as a Laboratory of the Senses: an immersive and process-based environment in which the artwork is not presented as a completed object but as an active device, capable of engaging visitors in a total aesthetic experience. In keeping with the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, the museum becomes a living organism in which painting, action-objects, sound, space, time and corporeality converge to generate an intensified perception of reality, reaffirming Hermann Nitsch’s vision of the artwork as a radical extension of life.
The exhibition centres on three large-scale paintings created for the 152.aktion, napoli 2017, one of the artist’s most radical performative actions. These works are presented in dialogue with photographic and video documentation of the action, alongside a selection of instruments from Nitsch’s painterly and performative practice. Also included is a significant portion of the chemical and pharmaceutical laboratory donated by the Scotto di Vettimo family, comprising bottles, flasks, alembics and containers that evoke the alchemical and experimental dimension of Nitsch’s work.
The display integrates artworks, documents and heterogeneous materials within an integrated sensory environment activated by the sound of the artist’s musical scores, the chromatic intensity of the paintings, the olfactory presence of essences and flowers, and the potential for tactile and gustatory experience. In this way, the museum is transformed into a relational and participatory space that challenges the paradigms of classical museology and proposes a new anthropology of aesthetic experience.
The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive public programme of talks, all delivered in Italian, featuring scholars and academics from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. These encounters are conceived as moments of critical reflection and discussion and include: An Idea of the Synesthetic Museum with Stefania Zuliani; Hermann Nitsch: The 152.aktion as a Total Work of Art with Lorenzo Mango; The Musical Scores of Hermann Nitsch with Massimiliano Locanto; The Museum as Performative Space with Maria Giovanna Mancini; The Painterly Experience of Hermann Nitsch with Maria De Vivo; Display Cases, Pedestals, Cabinets: Museum Punctuation in the Laboratory of the Senses with Elisabetta Modena; and The Nitsch Museum Laboratory as a Model of Sensory Curatorship with Gianpaolo Cacciottolo, culminating in a concluding synthesis meeting.
The entire project, including the installation, the exhibited works and the critical contributions developed through the talks, will form the basis of a dedicated publication, reaffirming the museum as a site of experimentation, embodied knowledge and profound participation.
Gesamtkunstwerk. The Laboratory of the Senses at the Hermann Nitsch Museum forms part of the Cultural Actions – Progetto XXI programme, a platform through which the Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee has promoted, since 2012, research and the enhancement of contemporary artistic practices, from emerging experiences to the most radical and seminal investigations. The programme contributes to the construction of alternative narratives of the contemporary and to the development of a regional arts system grounded in collaboration between public institutions and private partners.