Location:

Diocesan Museum of Brescia, Brescia (Italy)

Date:

11 September - 30 November 2025

Hermann Nitsch at the Diocesan Museum of Brescia (in a show) exploring the intense relationship between the body and the sacred.

50 years after the seminal ‘Aktion no. 50’ in which a blind-folded, naked man staged the sacrifice of the Crucifixion, thereby exposing the body to the suffering of the world in reference to God‘s salvific gesture of giving His son, the Diocesan Museum of Brescia is dedicating a retrospective to Hermann Nitsch. On display until 30 November 2025, the exhibition explores the intense relationship between the body and the sacred. A central paradigm in the oeuvre of the father of Viennese Actionism, the intricate and complex dynamics that govern and inform the performance of corporeality in a mythological-religious context move to the centre of an extensive show. Organised in collaboration with the Nitsch Foundation Vienna and the Gallery IAGA Contemporary Art of Cluj-Napoca, the exhibition includes a selection of artworks, among them several canvases of large dimension where an iconography of religious symbolism encounters a visual idiom rooted in Informel. The implicit themes of a 20th century malaise provoked by political turmoil and nationalist ideology with its resulting eruptions of violence permeate Nitsch‘s body of work from the time, thus becoming an invitation to reflect on a current status quo that points to the topicality of his oeuvre half a century after its first staging.

Image by Filippo Ribola