Hermann Nitsch at Galerie Thomas

Today’s premiere of Richard Wagner's "Walküre" at the Bayreuth Festival, visualised by Hermann Nitsch, makes us recollect on our cooperation with the artist and the Bavarian State Opera – one of the cultural highlights of the summer of 2011.

Nitsch realised that year’s festival premiere of Olivier Messiaen's "Saint François d'Assise" in an overall artistic concept. At the same time, a large show of Nitsch's works took place at the Galerie Thomas Modern, which in turn provided a lively setting for symposia and discussions with the artist.

Born in Vienna in 1938, Hermann Nitsch is one of the founders of the "Wiener Aktionismus", which became known in the 1960s for its spectacular performances. His artistic work is based on the idea of the synesthetic ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, in which painting plays a special role: Music, drama, performance and painting complement each other or are mutually dependent. The concept of "Klangfarbe" (sound of colour), which is immanent in Wagner's music, becomes in Nitsch's work a "Farbklang" (colour of sound), that goes far beyond the dimensions of the painting.
Nitsch has continuously expanded the sound of his colours over the years and changed the tonalities repeatedly. From the first "Schüttbilder" of the 1960s, where red tones, but also the black and brown of dried blood dominated, colours related to red such as orange, yellow and violet, but also chrome oxide green, which is complementary to red, have been added.

In Nitsch's more recent work, there are real colour explosions, in which all the colours of the rainbow spectrum are resounding in different combinations. Nitsch's colors are always full of explosive power, which make the dramatic process of action and the ecstasy of painting comprehensible even in later viewing: The spilling, splattering or smearing of the paint on the canvas is witness to this processuality.