Sale: 530 / Evening Sale / The Hermann Gerlinger Collection, June 10. 2022 in Munich Lot 49

 

49
Hermann Nitsch
Schüttbild (19. Malaktion 1986), 1986.
Oil on primed burlap
Estimate:
€ 100,000 / $ 108,000
Sold:
€ 212,500 / $ 229,500

(incl. surcharge)
Schüttbild (19. Malaktion 1986). 1986.
Oil on primed burlap.
Verso signed and dated. 190 x 300 cm (74.8 x 118.1 in).

• From the Duerckheim Collection.
• In 2010 shown at the im Hermann Nitsch Museum, Mistelbach.
• Red is inseparable from Nitsch‘s work - as color of both life and death.
• In July 2022 the 1st and 2nd day of the 6 day play (2nd version) by Hermann Nitsch will be performed in Prinzendorf/Austria
.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich.
Duerckheim Collection (in 1991 acquired from the above).

EXHIBITION: Hermann Nitsch. Meisterwerke aus der Duerckheim Collection, Hermann Nitsch Museum, MZM Museumszentrum, Mistelbach, May 1, 2010 - April 3, 2011, p. 104 (with illu.).

Viennese Actionism is the independent and groundbreaking contribution of Austrian artists to contemporary art of the 1960s and to what grew out of it. Even if the respective artists do not refer directly to the protagonists of Viennese Actionism, it is difficult to imagine works by Marina Abramovic or Jonathan Meese without the works of Hermann Nitsch and his comrades-in-arms Günter Brus and Otto Mühl. Their work extends the happening by acting with blood, urine and faeces in a way that was often unbearable for the society of the time. The extreme transgression of taboos is henceforth integrated into art as a means.

With his famous, well-composed mystery plays, Nitsch clearly shows both the repulsive and the attractive facets of life. The active body of the artist, not only perceptible here in the dynamic heaps, but also through the footprints running through the picture, is, together with the color, the most important means of communication. So the picture is only the indirect bearer of a message that was already expressed in the action of the creative process itself. "Nitsch interprets life as passion, the painting process as condensed life and thus as the epitome of passion. Every picture has this message. All splashes of paint are reminiscent of traces of blood. All pictures speak of injuries, of injuries that cannot be erased. Hermann Nitsch shows us his images as if he showed us wounds." (Wieland Schmied, in: Hermann Nitsch. The Architecture of the Orgy Mysteries Theater, Vol. II, Munich 1993, p. 15)

Red paint is poured across the large canvas in different directions, creating gradients, splattered and rubbed. "Red is the color that stimulates perception most intensely, because it is the color of life and death at the same time," says Nitsch. The action of pouring is an artistic process and the result is a controlled coincidence. Subsequent manual interventions, the processing of the paint on the canvas lying on the floor, take place with the use of the whole body. Nitsch even walks across the canvas, he is literally in the picture while it is being created: this canvas records the artistic result of the 19th painting campaign on August 20, 1986 in Prinzendorf. [CH/EH]



49
Hermann Nitsch
Schüttbild (19. Malaktion 1986), 1986.
Oil on primed burlap
Estimate:
€ 100,000 / $ 108,000
Sold:
€ 212,500 / $ 229,500

(incl. surcharge)