Moments from Studio Morra

Giuseppe Morra founded Studio Morra in Naples in 1974, and almost immediately became one of the most significant European champions of Viennese Actionism, the extreme, ritualistic, body-centered performance movement associated above all with Hermann Nitsch, whose work involving blood, animal carcasses, and quasi-religious ceremony was too provocative for most conventional galleries of the era to touch. The studio hosted Nitsch's 45th Action performance in Naples that same founding year, beginning a decades-long relationship between the gallery and the artist that eventually grew into the Fondazione Morra, a broader institutional home for Actionist and body-based performance art history.

Because the work associated with this gallery is genuinely intense, ritualistic, bodily, sometimes deliberately confrontational, go in prepared for material that's a considerable distance from a conventional painting-and-sculpture gallery visit. Naples itself is worth understanding as an unlikely but genuinely significant node in the international history of body and performance art, a reputation this gallery, more than almost any other single institution, was responsible for building.