Hermann Nitsch. Tribute

During the last years of his career, Nitsch developed an extraordinarily vibrant, ever more colorful form of painting, always closely connected with his performances and the places in which it was practiced. He was fascinated by Monet’s Nymphéas (Water Lilies), to which he paid tribute at the Musée de l’Orangerie whenever he visited Paris, and shortly before his death he was invited to dialogue with this masterpiece of impressionism, emphasizing the closeness he saw in it to the issues addressed in his own practice: “in my performances, my expressive and religious painting becomes a completed drama, an analytic dramaturgy. What remains to be seen is a frenzy of colors and shapes that detach themselves well beyond the content, like the ecstasies of color in Monet’s Nymphéas” (2022, in an interview with Sarah Imatte, Heritage Curator at the Musée de l’Orangerie).

Although Nitsch did not have the time to bring his project for the Musée de l’Orangerie to fruition, the museum wanted to pay tribute to him, a year after his death, in the form of this counterpoint, which brings together a selection of paintings and graphic works created shortly before his death, chosen directly in the artist’s studio. They are on exhibition in the “Pronaos” area leading to the Nymphéas and in the contemporary room on the Museum’s GF-2.