"ŒUVRES HISTORIQUES" - 16 Rue des Quatre Fils, Paris

RX&SLAG gallery is pleased to present Historical Works, an exhibition bringing together two historical artists of the gallery. Alain Kirili (1946-2021) and Hermann Nitsch (1938-2022). Beneath the gallery’s glass roof, sculptures and paintings are brought together in a dialogue in which matter, gesture, and the physical presence of the work occupy a central place.

                A major figure in contemporary French sculpture, Alain Kirili developed, from the 1970s onwards, a body of work deeply concerned with the relationship between form, space, and movement. Nourished by the history of Western sculpture, but also by music, dance, and calligraphy, his work moves away from a monumental and fixed conception of sculpture in favor of a sensitive, rhythmic, and organic approach to form. The artist’s gesture remains perceptible in his work, whether in steel, bronze, or clay. His forms, often composed of repeated or assembled elements, establish a particular relationship to the body and to space, between tension, balance, and movement.

His work maintains a close dialogue with music, particularly jazz and contemporary music, from which Kirili transposes notions of rhythm, improvisation, and composition intro sculptural space. Sculpture thus becomes an open language, founded on variation and the movement of the gaze.

The exhibition also presents a group of works on paper made by Alain Kirili in 1982, which reveals another aspect of his practice. Radical in both their form and subject matter, these works are permeated by his interest in the sacred and the great biblical narratives. They also reveal the influence of Japanese calligraphy, in which Kirili took a deep interest in the early 1980s, going so far as to train with a calligrapher and travel to Japan to deepen his knowledge of this traditional art. The gesture, essential to his sculptural practice, finds a new expression here: the stroke becomes both form and writing. These drawings thus extend his research into the sacred, particularly around the Crucifixion, a theme he considers foundational to the Western artistic and spiritual heritage.

Born in Vienna in 1938, Hermann Nitsch is one of the major figures of Viennese Actionism. From the late 1950s onwards, he developed an artistic practice that transcended the traditional boundaries between painting, theatre, music, and performance. His work found its most radical expression in the Orgien Mysterien Theater, conceived as a ritual theatre and a collective experience of catharsis.

His work is deeply marked by the notions of ritual, sacrifice, spirituality, and transcendence. As early as 1960, his Malaktionen (action paintings) gave rise to the Schüttbilder, large canvases made by pouring and splashing paint. Red occupies a fundamental place in them, evoking at once blood, life, death, and sacrifice. Color becomes matter and gesture, while the painting retains the trace of the action that produced it.

From 2000s onwards, Nitsch gradually broadened his palette, giving particular importance to yellow, whose luminosity profoundly transforms his compositions. Between red, yellow, and orange, color acquires a new, more luminous and spiritual dimension, without losing the physical power that characterizes his work.

At the center of one of his works is a white blouse, a recurring element from the 1980s onwards. Worn by Hermann Nitsch during his action paintings, this blouse, bearing the artist’s stigmata, is subsequently hung like a T-shaped trophy on the canvas. It becomes a metaphor for kenosis, a Greek term denoting the act of emptying oneself or divesting oneself of all things. In theology, kenosis refers to the renunciation of divine attributes. But beyond this symbolic reading, it seems above all to mark the artist’s desire to inscribe his own presence at the very heart of the work, blurring the boundary between body and painting.

A few drawings by Hermann Nitsch also punctuate the exhibition. Non-figurative, these “scribbles,” as the artist calls them, are made through a free and spontaneous gesture. They bear witness to the instinctive and gestural dimension of his practice. The line, sometimes nervous, sometimes more dense, reveals a tension between destruction and creation that runs more broadly throughout the artist’s work.

Although their practices and artistic worlds differ, Alain Kirili and Hermann Nitsch share a particular attention to the materiality of the work and the power of gesture. In Kirili’s work, gesture constructs form in space; in Nitsch’s, it becomes action, trace, and pictorial matter. Brought together beneath the gallery’s glass roof, their works thus offer a dialogue in which matter becomes the starting point for an experience that is at once physical and sensory.