Hermann Nitsch - Il colore del rito

insight in the artistic research

Biasutti & Biasutti Gallery is pleased to present “Hermann Nitsch. Il colore del rito”, an exhibition bringing together a selection of works created between 1984 and 2007, offering an insight into key moments in the artistic research of one of the founding figures of Viennese Actionism. Nitsch’s practice is rooted in the conceptual framework of the Orgien Mysterien Theater (Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries), an expansive synthesis of ideas, actions and artistic languages conceived as a form of philosophical poetry. Through this radical vision, Nitsch profoundly expanded the boundaries of artistic expression, challenging conventional modes of perception and interpretation.

The exhibition opens with two monumental canvases. “Schüttbild mit Hemd” (1984) was conceived within the context of the Orgien Mysterien Theater and emerged from a rigorous ritual process in which art, ritual and spirituality become inseparably intertwined. The shirt, a recurring element within Nitsch’s actions, becomes part of the composition itself, acting as a tangible trace of the work’s ritual and performative dimension. Alongside it, “Untitled” (1995) embodies a painting of striking material intensity. Layers of dense, saturated colour preserve the marks of the artist’s fingers and hands, rendering the physical gesture of painting visible and transforming the surface into a record of its own making.
The exhibition continues with a selection of paintings and works on paper produced between 2000 and 2007. Here, Nitsch’s sustained investigation of gesture and surface intersects with the practice of the Schüttbilder, or pour paintings, generating layers, traces and shifting chromatic fields. In the later works, colour acquires an increasingly dense and tactile quality, unfolding across a spectrum that moves from blood-reds to Lenten purples, deep blacks and natural greens.

“Il colore del rito” (the colour of ritual) brings together works from different periods not as a straightforward chronological sequence, but as interconnected moments within a single artistic process: the transformation of painting beyond the limits of representation and its emergence as a visceral, sensory and ritual experience. From the density of flesh to the luminosity of colour, from the tragic dimension of sacrifice to the ecstatic experience of rebirth, the works on view reveal the extraordinary complexity of Nitsch’s practice, in which art, philosophy, spirituality, theatre and music converge within a unified vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Total work of art).

Text © Biasutti&Biasutti