Marina Abramović

Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered performance as a visual art form. She created some of the most important early works in this practice, including Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she offered herself as an object of experimentation for the audience, as well as Rhythm 5 (1974), where she lay in the centre of a burning five-point star to the point of losing consciousness. These performances married concept with physicality, endurance with empathy, complicity with loss of control, passivity with danger. They pushed the boundaries of self-discovery, both of herself and her audience. They also marked her first engagements with time, stillness, energy, pain, and the resulting heightened consciousness generated by long durational performance.

In 2012 she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art that focuses on performance, long durational works, and the use of the “Abramović Method”. MAI is a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields.

Abramović was one of the first performance artists to become formally accepted by the institutional museum world with major solo shows taking place throughout Europe and the US over a period of more than 25 years. In 2024 Abramović opened her first solo exhibition in China, Transforming Energy, at the Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai. In 2023 Abramović was the first female artist to host a major solo exhibition in the Main Galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. This show will tour throughout Europe and Asia through 2026. Her first European retrospective, The Cleaner, was presented at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2017, followed by presentations at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk; Henie Onstad, Sanvika (2017); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2018); Centre of Contemporary Art, Torun (2019); and concluding at the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade (2019). In 2010 Abramović had her first major US retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Celebrating their 75th anniversary in 2026, the Berliner Festspiele show Balkan Erotic Epic in two parts: the exhibition at Gropius Bau and a new multi-hour theatre production with the same name.

In 1997 Abramović was awarded the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist for her performance Balkan Baroque at the Venice Biennale. In 2006 Abramović received the US Association of Art Critics Award for Best Exhibition of Time Based Art for her performance Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim in New York City. In 2008 Abramović received the Austrian Decoration of Honor for Science and Art in Vienna. In 2011 she was awarded Honorary Royal Academician status by The Royal Academy in London. In 2013 Abramović was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres Officier for her work in Boléro, Paris, and in 2022 she was promoted to Ordre des Arts et des Lettres Commandeur. In 2014 Abramović was named one of The 100 Most Influential People by TIME Magazine. In 2021 Abramović was awarded the Princess de Asturias Award for the Arts in Spain and the Golden Medal for Merits from the Republic of Serbia. In 2023 she was awarded the Sonning Prize from the University of Copenhagen, and officially received the award in 2024. In 2024 she was awarded an honorary degree from the Albertina Academy in Turin and the Luxembourg Peace Prize from the World Peace Forum. In 2025 she was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture by the Japan Art Association (2025).