Hermann Nitsch, New Paintings
February 28, 2004 – March 27, 2004
Mike Weiss Gallery, in collaboration with Galerie Heike Curtze, Vienna, is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Hermann Nitsch.
Hermann Nitsch is widely acknowledged as one of the most visionary Austrian artists and as one of the founders of Austrian Actionism. Within his paintings resides a single theme of process over image. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Nitsch relies on the plasticity of pigments and the corporeal connection between himself and his painting. But, unlike Pollock or De Kooning, Nitsch’s Actions have grown and transformed from sheer painting to an omnipotent experience. They become trances, states of abstraction, and rituals.
Fertile land, the blistering sun, billowing wheat fields, present themselves in hues of reds, yellows, and gold. They transform into bodily fluids. They become divine colors, the colors of paradise and hell.
Within the space we are shown installations which become extensions of the paintings. Altars become offerings, not up to God, but to the viewer, drawing them into the space, emphasizing the already emphasized inference to the body. A shirt becomes the crucified Christ, the disrupted Dionysus. It substitutes the sacrificed animal who, in turn, substitutes the redeemer and savior. Nothing is sacred and yet nothing is unholy in this world created by a man who, like his art, becomes an emblem, painting the cycles of life in white robes splattered with red paint.
Hermann Nitsch has recently had a large retrospective at the Kunst der Gegenwart in Austria and is in the permanent collection of such institutions as MoMA New York, Guggenheim New York, Metropolitan Museum, Tate Gallery, and Pompidou Center.
