MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ

Marina Abramović is a Serbian performance and conceptual artist who explores body art, endurance art and feminist art, the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Her work created a new kind of participation for observers, which focused on confronting pain, blood and physical limits of the body. Abramović was born in Belgrade, Serbia in 1946. In 1965, her work Truck Accidents was shown at the Workers’ Union Center and the Youth Cultural Center in Belgrade. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1965 to 1970 and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb from 1970 to 1972. Initially a painter, Abramović subsequently shifted her focus to conceptual work, sound pieces, and performance art. Abramović moved to Amsterdam in 1975, where she met artist Uwe Laysiepen (known as Ulay), with whom she would live and collaborate until 1988. Her art has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including shows organized by the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1993), Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (1995), Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent Gent (1997), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2005), and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2008). A retrospective of Abramović’s work opened in the spring of 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Abramović lives in New York.