The Color Red and the Sap of Life

The Color Red and the Sap of Life

The Color Red and the Sap of Life

„I want to create highly expressive art,“ says Hermann Nitsch, „an art that’s a wake-up call, that makes people realize they exist.“ He created his first Pour Paintings in 1961. Colors and blood were poured and splashed onto large canvases, spread with bare hands and only rarely applied with a brush. Soon, however, painterly actions and the Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries took center stage – a life-affirming feast of being that appeals to all the senses and is mostly staged at the artist’s residence, Prinzendorf Castle, Lower Austria. In place of paintings, relics now emerged from actions, for instance cloths and garments dyed with blood. It was only in the nineteen eighties that Nitsch began painting again. Now other colors came into the picture, but red still prevailed. It is the most intense color, a symbol of flesh and blood, love and violence, life and death.

Hermann Nitsch, Pour Painting, 1986
© Lower State of Austria, Lower Austrian State Collections
Photo: Peter Böttcher

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