Marina Abramović

The Hero

Size: Large

(b. 1946) Marina Abramović is undoubtedly one of the world’s most famous performance artists who has immensely contributed to the development of contemporary art since the 1970s. Born in Belgrade in 1946 to a strict partisan family during the Second World War, Marina Abramović completed her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade until 1970, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia. It was during the time she taught at Novi Sad, Serbia, that Marina Abramović started performing and interacting with the public. Over the years, Marina Abramović has explored various themes which included the limits of the body and possibilities of the mind. One of her earliest performances which took place in 1973 in Edinburgh involved a repetitive movement where the artist played the Russian game with 20 knives. As she cut herself 20 times and filmed her movements, the next step of her performance was to replicate her movements as she started a new cycle of jabbing a knife between her fingers in rhythmic interavls. This performance questioned the limitations of the body as she absorbed the pain and the confluence of past and present, as she attempted to replicate her movements, mistakes and all. When she moved to Amsterdam in 1976, Marina Abramović met German performance artist Uwe Laysiepen who went by the name ‘Ulay’. Together, they explored the concept of artistic identity and staged their new identity as twins as they dressed and behaved the same way. One of Marina Abramovic's most recent work which caught the public and media attention was her performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010. The show, titled The Artist is Present, was a performance which was held everyday during 3 months. The artist sat on a chair and faced anybody from the public who sat across from her. As an active defender of performance art, Marina Abramović created the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) in Hudson, New York. She has also partnered with many celebrities such as Lady Gaga and James Franco for the advance of the art in public spaces. Marina Abramović was married to Serbian artist Neša Paripovic from 1971 to 1976 and later on married Italian artist Paolo Canevari in 2005. Their relationship ended in 2009. Marina Abramović lives and works in New York.