HERMANN NITSCH – BAYREUTH WALKÜRE E RELITTI 158.aktion

In conjunction with the Nitsch Museum in Mistelbach and the Nitsch Foundation, with the support of the Goethe-Institut Neapel, The Museo Archivio Laboratorio per le Arti Contemporanee Hermann Nitsch Napoli, true to its vocation, is updating its exhibition space for the two-year period 2022-2024 to present Hermann Nitsch – BAYREUTH WALKÜRE E RELITTI 158.aktion. The exhibition opens on Saturday 22 October at 6 pm., offering the public a hitherto unseen dialogue between a wide selection of works from the malaktion walküre and the relics of the last action, directed by Hermann Nitsch in Naples.

The first set of works on show in the Museum’s ground-floor rooms come from Nitsch’s pictorial action in the form of a scenic event at the concert performance of Richard Wagner’s The Valkyrie at the Bayreuth Festival in the summer of 2021.

“I wish to put on a painting action where the colours of the poured and smeared paint, spanning the whole spectrum of the rainbow, attempt to compete in a positive sense with the blazing colouration of Wagnerian music. The events of the actual act of painting are to be like music. Sounds turn into colours. The painter is stirred and aroused, vents himself in the painting process. He is the first actor. He feels the very substance of the paint, the fluidness, the slithery slim, the pulp of the thick paint,” Hermann Nitsch wrote on that occasion (Wien, 1938 – Mistelbach, 2022). “I have enthusiastically loved Wagner’s work. The gesamtkunstwerk was his priority. It is experienced through all the senses. He was always my teacher, and still is today.”

“The total work of art in Nitsch’s interpretation – Lorenzo Mango writes in a composite essay accompanying the exhibition- is redolent of Wagner’s memory but goes beyond it. In the Orgies Mysteries Theatre, it is determined by experience, contact with the vital in its most absolute and primal form, the senses, and the sensuality of theatre”. Thus, Nitsch does not merely set the stage for The Valkyrie; rather, he sets in motion, as the action unfolds, a process of intensification and expansion of the sensory experience that lies at the heart of the Orgies Mysteries Theater. The Bayreuth experience will be reproduced through video projections, documentary, and photographic material, together with a selection of Nitsch’s drawings.

“I wish to put on a painting action where the colours of the poured and smeared paint, spanning the whole spectrum of the rainbow, attempt to compete in a positive sense with the blazing colouration of wagnerian music. The events of the actual act of painting are to be like music. Sounds turn into colours.”

In dialogue with the large paintings, the relics and documents from the 158.aktion (2020) – the last one to be led by Nitsch – will be on show to the public for the first time. In this action, the Austrian master acknowledged the primary importance in terms of dynamism and intensity of the “Sinfonia Napoli” – an integral part of the event, performed by the Orchestra Scarlatti under the baton of Andrea Cusumano – through which, in September 2020, he wished to celebrate both Giuseppe Morra and the city of Naples on the occasion of the twelfth anniversary of his Neapolitan Museum-Workshop.