Hermann Nitsch holds a significant historical position. In contrast, Donna Huanca and Harminder Judge are still active and contemporary, coming from very different backgrounds and locations. Can you describe the process of selecting the artists and how the main concept of the exhibition was developed?
Lisa Kandlhofer: The starting point for the exhibition was a desire to explore the influence Hermann Nitsch has had on a generation of artists. His pioneering work in the 1960s was instrumental in shaping our understanding of performance art today. Donna Huanca has spoken about the pivotal impact of Nitsch’s practice on her work. The two shared a close personal connection—Huanca invited Nitsch to exhibit in Dallas, and they later exchanged artworks, a gesture of mutual respect that left a lasting impression on me. Harminder Judge’s practice is also rooted in performance. While his recent works have become more materially driven, his sustained interest in ritual and the transformative potential of the body echoes Nitsch’s actions. It felt important not only to acknowledge Nitsch’s historical significance but also to show how his legacy continues to shape the language of younger, contemporary artists. That’s why we chose to include works spanning his first actions through to his final major performance in Bayreuth in 2021. Framing these alongside Huanca and Judge creates a dynamic, intergenerational dialogue. The gallery has always had a strong commitment to performance and performative practices. This exhibition honors that lineage while looking ahead, asking how ritualistic, bodily gestures are being reinterpreted by artists from distinct cultural and aesthetic perspectives today.
Reflecting on the meaning of ritual and its very specific translation into the works of Huanca, Judge, and Nitsch, could you tell us more about how ritual functions across their practices?
Lisa Kandlhofer: Ritual operates as a powerful through-line across all three artists, but it manifests in very distinct ways. For Nitsch, ritual operated at the core of his practice, from the early Orgien Mysterien Theater to his final performances, which he utilized as a structured space to confront ecstasy, violence, and transcendence. Huanca approaches ritual from a different conceptual angle, which could be seen at her Belvedere exhibition in 2019, which felt almost ceremonial. The judge’s relationship to ritual draws from meditative and immersive experience, where the act of layering pigment and manipulating surface has a devotional quality. While the references throughout all their practices are different, the function of ritual operates as a tool for transformation, presence, and grounding.
Donna, the works in this exhibition seem to be created through strong, physical engagement with the body. In your practice, skin often functions like clothing, and vice versa. What is your relationship to fashion, and how do you see the body as a site of display or protection?
Donna Huanca: The body is my primary tool and subject. I see skin not just as a surface but as a porous membrane—one that both reveals and protects. In my work, it functions as a threshold between the internal and external worlds. Fashion, for me, is ritualistic. It’s not about trends or adornment; it’s about how we armor ourselves, how we perform identity. By painting directly on skin and layering materials, I question how we present and disguise ourselves. The physical engagement, the movements of the performers, and the textures applied to skin all these transform the body into a living canvas. It’s both vulnerable and empowered.
There is a dominant use of blue in your works on display in the exhibition EMBODIED RITUALS. Could you elaborate on the meaning of blue in your practice? What does it symbolize for you?
Donna Huanca: Blue is meditative and elemental; it evokes water, air, and blood. It’s a space of introspection, healing, and timelessness. For me, it’s a neutral, calming element that invites projection and presence, linking the body to something vast, both exterior and interior.
Harminder, what stayed with me when I was researching your work is the technique in which you are making your pieces. I read another interview where you spoke about when you started using plaster and why that became important to your practice. It all seems to go back to this experience of rebuilding a house, which I think can also be seen as a kind of long-duration performance, in a way. It is interesting how this idea of “building a home” became a metaphor for the body, like our body as a house. Could you talk about how that poetic story of finding a technique is connected to the larger themes in your work?
Harminder Judge: I like where you’re going with that. The idea of the home it’s very present for me. I didn’t come to that house thinking about art. I came to it because I was lost. I wasn’t even calling myself an artist at that point. I had no income, no direction. So the house was a logistical solution, something to maybe help me earn money, but in the end, it became something much deeper.
As I rebuilt it, I realized the process was philosophical. When you don’t know who you are, maybe the first thing you do is build a shelter. It grounds you. It gives you some sense of place, even when everything else is floating. And in doing so, I found something very meaningful. It became a daily ritual. It was more than just a routine. That distinction became important; routine is something you repeat blindly. Ritual invites transformation.
Building a house is also a process of connecting your body with all sorts of materials. Can you elaborate more on this definition of ritual and how it allows change and transformation?
Harminder Judge: I just realized that’s what I needed as an artist: a practice that was material, structured, but also open. Because if I don’t have a structure, I just drift. I don’t do anything. So this gave me that. And then I started thinking about artists like Nitsch—how their entire lives were rituals. I asked myself once while visiting his castle in Prinzendorf, „Did he ever relax?” Probably not, right?
So, what was he searching for? And what was I searching for while building the house? Probably the same thing: meaning.
Your practice seems to hold traces of performance without being documented. You said you needed a structure. What we see in your works is abstraction. Could you expand on what you mean by „structure“ in this context?
Harminder Judge: Abstraction without structure is hard. It’s easy to make a mess; it’s difficult to make something meaningful. Every abstract artist I admire worked with defined structures, even if the surface looks chaotic. There’s discipline underneath it.
My pieces are often created after a gesture, a figure, or a physical moment. So there’s this trace of performance embedded within them.
That tension between speed and slowness feels present in the work. The works look fragile, even glassy, but they’re also very solid. There’s this ambiguity: they’re vertical, sculptural, but not quite paintings, not quite reliefs.
Harminder Judge: Yes, I love that they trick you. They reward multiple viewings. From one angle, they feel painterly. From another, they’re unmistakably objects. They’re solid. And while they look heavy, they’re not. While they look fragile, they’re strong.
Donna, in your practice, you use a wide range of materials, from natural fibers like human hair to synthetic ones, and from oil paint to digital prints. How do you approach materiality as a language? And how does that material awareness translate into a conscious use of resources?
Donna Huanca: Material is its own voice; it holds memory, energy, and context. I’m interested in juxtaposing organic with synthetic because it reflects the duality of our lived experience: nature and technology, body and screen. Using hair, clay, and digital images, each has its own resonance and political charge. I don’t believe in the purity of the medium. At the same time, I’m deeply conscious of sustainability. I work with recycled materials whenever possible, and I often reuse elements from past installations. The ephemeral nature of performance, of time-based gestures, means I’m also resisting the demand for permanence.
There are grand and expressive gestures in the paintings, the use of rich materials, and visible traces of action. The human body plays an important role in the exhibition. How is this focus on the body transferred to the experience of the viewer within the exhibition space?
Lisa Kandlhofer: The sense of embodied experience was something that we thought carefully about when conceiving the exhibition. The scale of many works draws you in in a very bodily way, and the flow of the exhibition echoes that sense of physical passage.
Group exhibition: Donna Huanca, Harminder Judge, Hermann Nitsch: Embodied Rituals
Exhibition duration: 21 May – 20 Jun 2025
Opening hours: Tuesday-Friday: 11 AM – 6 PM | Saturday: 11 AM – 4 PM
Address and contact:
Galerie Kandlhofer
Brucknerstrasse 4, 1040 Vienna
www.kandlhofer.com
www.instagram.com/galerie.kandlhofer
More about the exhibition: www.kandlhofer.com/exhibitions/
Born in 1980 in Chicago, Illinois, Donna Huanca’s interdisciplinary practice evolves across painting, sculpture, performance, choreography, video, and sound, crafting a unique visual language based on collaboration and innovation. www.ruaminx.com, www.instagram.com/ruaminx
Harminder Judge (b. 1982, Rotherham, UK) lives and works in London. He graduated from the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 2021. Selected recent solo exhibitions include Harminder Judge: Bootstrap Paradox, moCa Cleveland, Cleveland, USA, 2025; Cliff and Cleft, Gathering, Ibiza, Spain, 2024; A Ghost Dance, Matt’s Gallery & The Sunday Painter, London, UK, 2024; and Sea and Stone and Rib and Bone, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, India, 2023. www.harminderjudge.com, www.instagram.com/harminderjudge