Marina Abramovic (b. 1946)

Serbian artist Marina Abramovic has long been regarded as one of the foremost performance artists of the 20th century. The present example is the complete set of photographs with text panels documenting the artist’s most iconic performances. Using her own body as canvas, and the limits of her mental and physical endurance as medium, Abramovic has in her 40-year career, consistently striven for spiritual and emotional transcendence through her artistic investigations. In the 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, many of her historic performances were reenacted. Abramovic also performed a new work, lasting the entire span of the exhibition and the longest piece to date. She invited visitors to sit before her in the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, titled The Artist is Present.
Within the 12 works presented here, gelatin silver prints illustrate her various performances and are accompanied by a letterpressed card that details the actions during the piece. Her first public performance, Rhythm 10, took place in 1973 in Edinburgh. Abramovic used two tape recorders and knives, jabbing herself between the fingers. Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife and continue the Russian knife game. The work was an exploration of pain, memory and repetition. The violent nature, the act of self-mutilation garnered a great deal of attention from the larger art public. In Lips of Thomas, Abramovic used a razor to cut a star into her stomach in front of her audience. Writhing in pain, she lay on ice blocks and whipped herself—further pushing the limitations of her discomfort and exposing not only her naked body, but also her inner turmoil as incited by physical pain. Indeed, the participation of the audience by experiencing firsthand the destruction of another human being by her own free will as crucial to the success of her work. Abramovic explains: “Through performance I found the possibility of establishing a dialogue with the audience through an exchange of energy, which tended to transform the energy itself. I could not produce a single work without the presence of the audience, because the audience gave me the energy to be able, through a specific action, to assimilate it and return it, to create a genuine field of energy” (L. Mark, Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Cambridge, 2007, p. 209).

Other complete sets from the edition are included in the following public collections: Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Kunstmuseum Bern and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

The literature references for this lot can be accessed at christies.com