Arnulf Rainer & Hermann Nitsch

Arnulf Rainer (1929–2025) and Hermann Nitsch (1938–2022) are among Austria’s most significant artists of the post-1945 era. Although they followed different paths, they are united by a radical expansion of the concept of art: The focus is not only on the finished work, but also on the artistic process and the question of what a painting actually is.

Arnulf Rainer is regarded as a pioneer of informal painting in Austria. With his “overpaintings,” developed beginning in the 1950s, he fundamentally revolutionized painting and gained worldwide recognition. 

Hermann Nitsch was a co-founder of Viennese Actionism and, with his Orgy-Mystery-Theater, created one of the most significant total works of art of the postwar era. As an Actionist, painter, composer, and set designer, he combined painting, music, performance, and ritual into an art form that engages all the senses.

Painting as a Process
The exhibition explores themes and motifs that these two exceptional artists addressed in different ways. These include, for example, the cross as a metaphor for the artistic creative process, the relationship between proportion and color in painting, and photography as a means of artistic expression. 

Rainer developed a process-oriented style of painting from the act of overpainting, one that unfolded over the years and across various media—from paintings to photographs to books. Handprints, fingerprints, cross-like forms, and photographic self-portraits make the artist’s own body part of the pictorial narrative.

Prinzendorf Castle as a Place of Encounter
Prinzendorf Castle in Lower Austria was Nitsch’s long-standing creative base—a place that the artist transformed into an organism, both literally and symbolically. In his print portfolio Die Architektur des Orgien Mysterien Theaters, Nitsch combines architectural elements with forms of the human body as well as fingerprints and handprints. Rainer, too, had a connection to Prinzendorf: it was here that he created his monumental painting Self-Burial or The Suffering of Christ, The Joy of Christ?.

First Joint Exhibition
The exhibition presents Rainer and Nitsch not as successive chapters in Austrian art history, but as two simultaneously vibrant artistic positions. Through the dialogue between their works, commonalities become apparent: process and transformation, body and trace, cross and wound, as well as the shift of art from object to experience. For the first time, an exhibition is dedicated exclusively to these two outstanding artistic figures in a joint show.

Curators: Nikolaus Kratzer, Helmut Zambo

TIP: At the nitsch museum in Mistelbach, visitors have the opportunity to delve into the multifaceted