In the heart of Vienna, within the rarefied walls of Galerie Kandlhofer, Embodied Rituals unfolds like a living body – articulated and traversed by subterranean currents. Far from being a mere group show, the exhibition constructs a true field of forces between three artists – Donna Huanca, Harminder Judge and Hermann Nitsch – for whom gesture is not a simple trace, but a transformative act, and matter not a medium, but a manifestation. What unites these works is not so much a theme as a shared sensorial density, an energy that runs across surfaces, bodies and residues. The works on display do not describe rituals, they perform, evoke, and release them in the form of pigment, stratifications, fluids, and interruptions. Each piece becomes a threshold, a zone of friction between the organic and the sacred, between what is revealed and what is withheld. The term “ritual” – so often diluted and trivialized in contemporary curatorial language – is regenerated here. It becomes flesh, action, time. In these artists’ practices, it is not just a symbolic grammar, but a passage, a cult of the body and the gaze that repeats and disintegrates, like chromatic matter that settles and dissolves or blood that runs and leaves its trace.
VV.AA., “Embodied Rituals”, 2025, installation view at Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, photo credits Manuel Carreon Lopez, courtesy Galerie Kandlhofer
If, as Hans‑Georg Gadamer argued, art is «what resists time through sensory experience», then this exhibition is an invitation to slow down the frenzy of the digital age and rediscover the weight of the body, the intimacy of matter and the slowness of perception. Gadamer reminds us that authentic art is not consumed with a distracted glance, but experienced as an event that engages the senses and the viewer’s inner dimension. In a world dominated by fast, anesthetizing images, Embodied Rituals calls for the necessary time to be affected by the work – to immerse oneself in its physical and symbolic layers. The artists’ gestures – embodied in pigment, blood, skin, dust—become a primordial language, a shared liturgy that invites conscious suspension.
VV.AA., “Embodied Rituals”, 2025, installation view at Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, photo credits Manuel Carreon Lopez, courtesy Galerie Kandlhofer
Donna Huanca, Bolivian‑American artist born in Chicago, creates complex environments in which painting, sculpture and installation merge into an almost ceremonial dimension. Her works often emerge from previous performances, preserving the memory of the painted body as a fossil trace: skin becomes surface, surface becomes archive. In Polystyrene Fecundity (2019), Huanca uses oil and sand on digital print on canvas, crafting a dry, porous materiality balanced between sensual allure and detachment; the surface stretches like living skin, evoking an epidermal topography. In Geotropism (2019), a sculpture made of synthetic hair oil, and sand on steel, the artist explores the boundary between nature and culture, identity and artifice, memory and transformation. Hair – intimately linked to personal history and memory – is rendered artificial here, suggesting otherness and ongoing metamorphosis. Oil and sand recall skin and earth, organic materials that settle and transform over time, while the cold steel introduces a tension between the natural and the industrial. The title itself refers to the phenomenon by which plants orient themselves in response to gravity, underscoring the dynamic relationship between physical presence and environment – a living substance that constantly molds and adapts. Her aesthetics are not meant to be interpreted, but absorbed.
VV.AA., “Embodied Rituals”, 2025, installation view at Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, photo credits Manuel Carreon Lopez, courtesy Galerie Kandlhofer
Also featured is Harminder Judge, British artist born in Rotherham and based in London, whose practice is grounded in gestures of removal and revelation. His surfaces are not painted but revealed: pigment settles into plaster and is brought to light through a slow, almost sculptural process. There are no brushes, only abrasion, polishing, and listening. The Untitled (2025) works are made with plaster, resin, mineral pigments, and oil on hard support, but vary in size and scenic presence. Some 200 × 200 cm panels emerge as secular icons, with surfaces that convey not just color, but a silent depth, evoking a geological and sedimentary dimension. Other, much smaller works (25 × 25 × 3 cm) maintain the same material rigor but invite a more intimate, meditative experience, where the balance between void and intensity becomes even more subtle. Judge describes his process as deeply physical and cyclical: he pours pigment and colored plaster into large molds over plastic surfaces, tilts and agitates them, layers anew, reinforces with fiber, and polishes – until the surface begins to vanish. When dissatisfied with the result, he breaks the panels, pulverizes the material and reintegrates it into future works – creating a material memory of failure. «When they work, they tell me», he says, «and when they don’t, I break them and make something else». For him, these are not paintings in the traditional sense: «everything is contained within the material itself». It is this alchemy – of color, pressure and patience – that transforms surfaces into visual portals capable of absorbing the gaze. Judge thus builds a form of spiritual abstraction, profoundly material, echoing funeral rituals and symbolic practices of loss and transformation. Within the formal rigor and monochromatic restraint, a tactile intimacy emerges, a passage between the visible and the invisible, where body and spirit meet.
VV.AA., “Embodied Rituals”, 2025, installation view at Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, photo credits Manuel Carreon Lopez, courtesy Galerie Kandlhofer
Hermann Nitsch, a mythic figure in the history of Austrian art, appears in the gallery as a foundational presence. His Schüttbilder – literally “poured paintings” – are not for contemplation, but for passage: visceral, violent and sacred experiences. Among the works on view, Schüttbild (1997), a large oil on jute (200 × 300 cm), reveals the vigorous gesture with which color is poured onto a rough, resistant surface – imprinting all the primal energy of the painterly act. The dominant red becomes a symbol of ritual blood – evoking rupture, sacrifice and memory. Schüttbild (2021), acrylic on jute (270 × 120 cm), carries the same charge: a vertical pour of deep, dense red flows across the canvas in an almost theatrical motion. Created in preparation for Wagner’s Walküre at Bayreuth, this work testifies to Nitsch’s characteristic synesthesia of painting, music, and theater. Here, painting is not representation, it is an event, a brutal and secular officiation. Moving through the exhibition, Eroberung von Jerusalem (2008), silkscreen on original relic (175 × 290 cm), interweaves image and memory, evoking an epic and sacrificial dimension. The piece merges the precision of mechanical silkscreening with the tangible presence of a relic, creating a tension between historical past and physical present.
VV.AA., “Embodied Rituals”, 2025, installation view at Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, photo credits Manuel Carreon Lopez, courtesy Galerie Kandlhofer
The impact on the viewer is immediate and profound: the monumentality of the work does not overwhelm but invites a slow, meditative, almost hypnotic reflection. A sense of profane sacredness emerges – an ancestral energy that crosses space and time, making us feel part of an ancient, never fully extinguished rite. The complex surface, with its colors and textures, suggests scars and indelible memories, leaving an impression of cruel yet cathartic beauty. This dialectic between visibility and absence, between trace and void, makes Eroberung von Jerusalem a work that offers itself without fully revealing, urging the gaze to become body, and the mind to transform into a site of experience rather than passive contemplation. In addition to the paintings, the exhibition includes a series of documentary photographs capturing emblematic moments of Nitsch’s actions. These images, charged with expressive power and symbolic depth, reveal the ceremonial essence of his performances, offering a visual testimony that expands the understanding of his work beyond the canvas. These and other works on view affirm Nitsch’s art as a battlefield where color and surface collide, merge and consume one another. Every gesture, every pour, is an act invoking time, flesh and transcendence. For Nitsch, art is never a formal illusion—it is a total, tragic, physical and inevitable experience.
VV.AA., “Embodied Rituals”, 2025, installation view at Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, photo credits Manuel Carreon Lopez, courtesy Galerie Kandlhofer
Embodied Rituals does not propose a narrative but a perceptual threshold. The works of Huanca, Judge and Nitsch do not illustrate ritual, they renew it. And as they force us to slow our gaze, they restore gesture as a form of embodied knowledge. Between flesh, pigment and absence, the exhibition returns to art an ancient power: to wound, to heal, and ultimately, to transform.
Info:
Donna Huanca, Harminder Judge & Hermann Nitsch. Embodied Rituals
22/05/2025 – 20/06/2025
Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 11:00 – 18:00, Saturday 11:00 – 16:00
Galerie Kandlhofer
Brucknerstrasse 4, 1040 Vienna
www.kandlhofer.com
She graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania. During her lifetime, she has experienced various arts including sculpture, theatre, dance and photography, and the latter one became the springboard for her eclectic and innovative artistic path. In 2010, she approached the art curatorial world and started to write reviews and critical texts; later, she founded “Artisti Italiani – arti visive e promozione”, an organisation which deals with all the promotional aspects of contemporary art.
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