Untitled

Untitled (1995) is a dynamic and dramatic painting by Hermann Nitsch that spans an extraordinary three metres in width. Gushing with explosive, impasto splatters of red oil, the present painting echoes the extreme, blood-drenched bacchanals of Nitsch’s famed performances. The father of Viennese Actionism, his ritualistic, existential, and visceral spectacles—together forming a ‘total artwork’ that Nitsch coined Das Orgien Mysterien Theater (The Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries)—involved nude human performers, animal carcasses, blood, music and acted violence. As the actions grew in scale and ambition across the decades—his culminating ‘six day play’ in 1998 involved 500 participants—he began to conceive of them as huge, animated paintings. In the present painting, the coarse, burlap support becomes the site of the artist’s own theatre: coagulating at the centre of the composition in a thick, almost sculptural relief are the emphatic smears and scrapes of Nitsch’s hands. He believed that art and life could fuse through ecstatic sensory gesture, and here, engaging directly with his medium in a distinctly carnal expression, the work bears the multiple traces of Greek tragedy, twentieth-century automatism, Surrealism, German Expressionism and Freudian psychoanalysis. Compounding painting and performance, the present painting is a powerful testament to the spirit of Nitsch’s lifelong artistic ambitions.