Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović
Manfred Werner / Tsui, CC BY-SA 3.0

The grande dame of performance art.

For more than fifty years Marina Abramović has used her own body as material, testing the limits of endurance and presence.

Marina Abramović was born in 1946 in Belgrade in what was then Yugoslavia. Both her parents had been partisans during the Second World War and later held high positions in the communist state. The home was strict, and she has described a childhood marked by discipline. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade and then in Zagreb, and started out as a painter but soon turned to performance.

In the Rhythm series of the early 1970s she used her own body as material. The best known is Rhythm 0 in Naples in 1974. For six hours she stood still and let the audience use 72 objects on her, from a rose to a loaded pistol. The audience grew increasingly aggressive, and the work became a frightening experiment in human behaviour.

In the mid-1970s she met the German artist Ulay, Frank Uwe Laysiepen, in Amsterdam. They became a couple and worked together for twelve years. In Imponderabilia of 1977 they stood naked in a narrow doorway through which the audience had to squeeze. In Rest Energy of 1980 they held a drawn bow between them with the arrow pointed at her heart. The collaboration ended in 1988 when they walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and met in the middle to say goodbye.

In 1997 she won a Golden Lion in Venice for Balkan Baroque, in which she scrubbed a heap of bloody bones in response to the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Her greatest popular success was The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010. For almost three months she sat silently at a table and met the gaze of more than a thousand visitors, one at a time.

Abramović has founded an institute to preserve and teach performance art. The retrospective The Cleaner opened at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2017, and in 2023 she became the first woman to have a major solo exhibition in the main galleries of the Royal Academy in London. She has made performance an established art form in museums, but her work also provokes debate about boundaries, risk and staging.