Marina Abramović

Belgrade, 1946

Marina Abramović studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade between 1965 and 1970; she currently lives in New York. At the end of the 1960s, she left off painting and drawing for performance and body art and explores concepts such as pain, pleasure, violence, fear and consciousness through her body. In 1976, she settled in Amsterdam, where she met artist Uwe Laysiepen – Ulay – with whom she formed the collective known as The Other until 1988, a period in which photography, cinema and video took a preeminent place in her creative process.

Her personal experience in the Balkans, Laos, China and the Sahara Desert, among others, are reflected in video installations as exercises of introspection that reflect on the cultural references of these places. Abramović received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1997), the Niedersächsischer Kunstpreis (2003) and the New York Dance and Performance Award, known as “The Bessies” (2003), among other awards. She is also working on the creation of the Marina Abramović Institute in Hudson (New York), an entity devoted to performance and at the same time conceived as a training centre, based on her work method.

Numerous individual and collective exhibitions have displayed her work all over the world: the Centre Pompidou (Paris, 1990), Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca (1996), Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, 2001), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela, 2003), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2005) and the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2010). A representation of her work can be found in the collections of museums as important as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Fons National d’Art Contemporain (France), Kunstmuseum Bern (Switzerland), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), and Es Baluard Museu dArt Modern i Contemporani de Palma.

S.H/N.A.