Early years
Rythm 0 performance
Abramović was born November 30, 1946 and raised in Belgrade,
Yugoslavia (now Serbia).
In 1965 she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade to study
painting. Eventually she became interested in the possibilities of
performance art, specifically the ability to use her body for artistic
and spiritual exploration.
In 1972, she conceived a series of visceral performance pieces that
engaged her body as both subject and medium.
- In Rhythm 10 (1973), for instance, she methodically stabbed the spaces between her fingers with a knife, at times drawing blood.
- In Rhythm 0 (1974) she stood immobile in a room for six hours along with 72 objects, ranging from a rose to a loaded gun, that the audience was invited to use on her however they wished.
These pieces provoked controversy for their perilousness and for Abramović’s occasional nudity, which would become a regular element of her work thereafter.
Amsterdam and Ulay
In 1975 Abramović moved to Amsterdam, and a year later she began collaborating with Uwe Laysiepen (Ulay), a like-minded German artist. Much of their work together was concerned with gender identity, most notoriously Imponderabilia (1977), in which they stood naked while facing each other in a museum’s narrow entrance, forcing visitors to squeeze between them and, in so doing, to choose which of the two to face.
Abramovic on Big China Wall
The couple also traveled and performed extensively around the world. They broke up in 1988 at the conclusion of a performance in which they started at opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and met in the middle.
Fame
Abramović’s profile was raised in 1997, when she won the Golden Lion for best artist at the Venice Biennale. Her exhibit, the brooding Balkan Baroque, used both video and live performance to interrogate her cultural and familial identity.
Balkan baroque performance
By 2005 she had begun to ruminate on the legacy of performance art, a genre in which individual works usually had no life beyond their original staging, apart from their occasional preservation on film.
The Artist is Present
That year, in an attempt to counteract that tradition, Abramović presented Seven Easy Pieces, a series of reenactments, or “reperformances,” of seminal works—two of her own and five by other performance artists, including Bruce Nauman and Joseph Beuys—at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
In 2010 the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City held a
wide-ranging retrospective of Abramović’s work, The Artist Is Present.
For the exhibition, Abramović debuted the eponymous performance piece,
in which she sat quietly as museum patrons took turns sitting opposite
and looking at her as she gazed back.
Piece brought Abramović further recognition—as did the 2012 HBO
documentary The Artist Is Present. A chronicle of the retrospective,
it also documented Abramović’s test of physical endurance as she sats
motionless for seven hours each day during the three-month-long
exhibition run.
"Artist is present" performance
After the MoMA retrospective, Abramović became a celebrity, continuing to explore and teach performance art bthrough workshops at art galleries and her organizationsthe Marina Abramović Institute. In 2016 Abramović published the memoir Walk Through Walls.