Born in Vienna, Nitsch received training in painting when he studied at the Wiener Graphische Lehr-und Versuchanstalt, during which time he was drawn to religious art.
[2][3] He is associated with the Vienna Actionists—a loosely affiliated group of Austrian artists interested in transgressive themes and the centrality of the body in their artwork, which also includes Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
[4] In 1966 he was with Yoko Ono, Gustav Metzger, Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Wolf Vostell, Juan Hidalgo, and others, as a participant of the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London.
[5] In 1962, together with Otto Muehl and Adolf Frohner, he performed the three-part action “The Blood Organ” in Vienna, for which a joint manifesto was published.
In his first Orgie Mysterien Theater performance, Nitsch and his friends used animal carcasses, entrails, and blood similarly to a ritual.
In 2001, Nitsch was responsible for the stage design and costumes for the performance of the Gandhi opera Satyagraha by the American composer Philip Glass in the Festspielhaus St. Pölten in Lower Austria.
Nitsch's worldview was strongly influenced by mystical authors, but also by de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Antonin Artaud, among others.
Conversely, some action and performance artists, including former comrades-in-arms, distance themselves from what they consider to be the overly religious element of his work.
From November 1988 to January 1989, the Städtische Galerie in the Lenbachhaus in Munich showed some of the artist's works as part of the solo exhibition "Nitsch - Das Bildnerische Werk".
On 19 November 2005, the 122nd action of the Orgies-Mysteries-Theater took place at Vienna's Burgtheater as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations for the reopening after World War II.
[9][10] Because of their intense and graphic nature, often using nude performers and blood, Nitsch was subject to several court trials with charges of gross public indecency, and even sentences of three prison terms, because of his artworks.