Hermann Nitsch: Cult avant-garde artist dies

Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch, who shocked audiences with paintings and performance art using human blood and dead animals, has died at age 83, his family said Tuesday.

"Hermann Nitsch died peacefully at the age of 83 after a serious illness," read a statement from his family after the artist passed away in a hospital in the province of Lower Austria.

Radical art experimentation

Born in Vienna in 1938, Nitsch was 15 when he attended the Graphic Teaching and Research Institute in the Austrian capital.

By the late 1950s, his early religion-themed works inspired him to conceive the idea of a ritual blood spectacle, a total work of art consisting of music, theater and painting that was to dominate his work until his death.

Along with fellow radical artist Günter Brus, Nitsch was a key member of Vienna's Aktion art movement that practiced violent performance art rituals involving blood, faeces and crucifixions — often as a statement again Austrian fascism.

His own provocative Aktion in the early 1960s took the form of the long-running "Orgies Mysteries Theater," a performance grounded in animal slaughters and religious sacrifices.

In August 1998, Nitsch's monumental project, nearly 40 years in the making and his 100th Aktion, was a re-imagining of the story of creation. This "Six Day Play" was the self-described pinnacle of his career.

Previously, the artist had taken part in two "Documenta" art fairs in Kassel, Germany, and in 1975, radical performance artist Marina Abramovic took part in one of his rituals. 

'Stirring up the audience'

The cult provocateur's more recent shows included an exhibition in Sicily, Italy, in 2015, which featured dead animals on crucifixes, and led to animal rights groups to accuse him of blasphemy and inciting violence.

His wife Rita Nitsch told AFP press agency at the time that "this kind of small ruckus" is inevitable with his work, but that "quality has triumphed over the polemic."

"I want my work to stir up the audience, the participants of my performances," the artist once said. "I want to arouse them by the means of sensual intensity and to bring them an understanding of their existence."

In 2018, Hermann Nitsch took part in the "1914/1918 - Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever" exhibition marking the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI, turning a cube of wood into a symbolic butcher's block covered with blood to recall the brutality of war.

And in summer 2021, Nitsch painted scenes for a concert version of Richard Wagner's “Walküre” at the Bayreuth Festival. 

The artists legacy is assured, with two museums dedicated to Nitsch's work having been established in Naples, Italy and in Mistelbach, Austria.