Hermann Nitsch

Austrian performance artist Hermann Nitsch has gained an international reputation for the radical style of performance art he has been practicing since the birth of the genre in the 1950s. To date, Nitsch has staged more than 100 performances in locations around the world. He is best known for his Orgien Mysterien Theater performances, which explore taboo and defy the limits of conventional performance, often involving blood, violence, nudity, and religious ritual. He was affiliated with the Vienna Actionists, a brief movement by Austrian artists in the 1960s that sought to bring the semblance of violent acts into the burgeoning performance art sphere. While recognized as a performance artist, Nitsch originally trained as a painter, creating splatter paintings that also called attention to the connection of aggressive acts and art.

Nitsch was born in Austria in 1938, and he later studied painting at the Wiener Graphische Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, as well as dozens of major museums around the world. His exhibitions and performances have taken place in hundreds of cities across Europe, North America, Asia, South America, and the Middle East.