Description
"MY WORK SHOULD BE A SCHOOL OF LIFE, REALIZATION AND RECOVERY." Hermann Nitsch
Hermann Nitsch was a co-founder of Viennese Actionism and was one of the most versatile contemporary artists: actionist, painter, composer (symphonies, organ concertos), stage designer. His Gesamtkunstwerk, the Orgien Mysterien Theater, encompasses the broad spectrum of his art by requiring the use of all five senses.
SPECIAL EXHIBITION 2026: Hermann Nitsch. from sunrise onwards
March 22 to November 29, 2026
"I wanted to be a church painter", Hermann Nitsch once said about himself. He did not become a church painter - but the sacred forms the innermost core of his world-famous Gesamtkunstwerk, the Orgien Mysterien Theater. Since his first theoretical sketches in 1957, Nitsch has understood religious rituals of all cultures as sensual, symbolically condensed forms that lead into the depths of human existence. For him, chalices, crosses, monstrances and liturgical colors are not mere quotations, but bearers of an existential experience.
Growing up in the Catholic Vienna of the 1940s and 1950s, Nitsch recognized early on that the sensuality of these rites - their physicality, smells, colors and sounds - was in danger of disappearing in modern society. His Orgien Mysterien Theater was intended to bring back this intensity: a space in which life could be experienced in all its extremes - joy and pain, birth and death, overwhelming and liberation.
The exhibition "Hermann Nitsch. from sunrise onwards" is dedicated to this sensual dimension of his work. Paintings in liturgical colors, landscape photographs, videos and sound elements condense into an atmospheric space of experience. Nature - the Weinviertel, the light, the elements - becomes the central setting: in the 6-day play, O.M. Theater's most comprehensive project, each phase begins "from sunrise". It is nature itself that determines the rhythm of this work.
Nitsch understood his theater as an aesthetic ritual of existence. The festival becomes a drama, the drama a catharsis. The world is to be accepted - in its beauty and its cruelty, its possibilities for happiness and its abysses. The goal is a state of heightened perception, a mystical condensation of one's own existence, which intensifies into a comprehensive sense of being alive.
The exhibition shows rarely presented works, including Nitsch's self-recorded landscape videos, and invites visitors to understand the Orgien Mysterien Theater not as a provocation, but as a visionary attempt to make the existential depth of life tangible in a new way.
Curator: Julia Moebus-Puck M.A.
