Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović has pioneered performance as a visual art form throughout her career, developing some of the most important early examples of the practice. These include Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she offered herself as an object of experimentation for the audience, as well as Rhythm 5 (1974), where she laid in the center of a burning five-point star to the point of losing consciousness. These performances married concept with physicality, endurance with empathy, complicity with loss of control, and passivity with danger.

In 2012, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art, that focuses on performance, long durational works, and the use of the “Abramović Method.” She was one of the first performance artists to be formally accepted by the institutional museum world with major solo shows taking place throughout Europe and the US over a period of more than 25 years. In 2023, Abramović will be the first female artist to host a major solo exhibition in the Main Galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Her first European retrospective “The Cleaner” was presented at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden in 2017, followed by presentations at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark; Henie Onstad Art Center, Norway (2017), Bundeskunsthalle, Germany (2018), Centre of Contemporary Art, Toruń, Poland (2019), and concluding at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia (2019). In 2010, Abramović had her first major US retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

She has been awarded the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale; the US Art Critics Association Award for Best Exhibition of Time Based Art; the Austrian Decoration of Honor for Science and Art, Vienna; Honorary Royal Academician status by The Royal Academy of Arts, London; Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People; and the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts.

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