It’s rightly said, if an artwork fails to trigger emotions, then it’s certainly not been worth the effort.

Now, what if the artwork triggers emotions deep and pure, to an extent that one feels the pain of being dismayed, dejected and terrorized to the core. What if an artwork is so powerful that it shifts you from your plane? What if it takes you to a zone where you are left feeling trepid and infinitely weak in an abyss of never ending sorrow, leaving you with an open ended question of pain and whys? When finally you are left wondering why you are being subjected to such torture.

Hermann Nitsch’s art work at first glance looks like a work of a tortured soul, one who is not too invested in the idea of happiness. His works are raw, against all fixed ethics, beliefs and against all sorts of structured ways of living. Some of his controversial works involve mass stomping on animal intestines, a six-day festival of naked people, mass intoxication and large canvases drenched in red like the after effect of a massacre. His works are not about the surface – it has to do more with the sense of fear and pain that lives deep inside us.

Hermann Nitsch makes viewers think about their feelings of disgust and soaks them in a world that is dark and ugly, yet pure. But one can’t deny the fact that pain and rawness are very much a part of our civilized society. What his works do is let us see what we try to ignore in our day to day life. It reminds us of the tough time humanity has to go through while being totally abducted from the basic core values of our existence.

His images too are intensely painful, created to invoke something emotional and powerful, which we run away from in real life. Artists all around the world are busy making artworks beautiful and special. Here we have Hermann Nitsch who gives us a rare opportunity to get a glimpse of the darker side of life. One can say- the way to illumination is through the dark alleys of time.