Marina Abramovic (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Since the early 1970s, Marina Abramovic (b. 1946) has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form, exploring her physical and emotional limits in some of the most iconic works in contemporary art. Her body is her primary subject and medium, and she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in her ongoing quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. As a vital member of the generation of pioneering performance artists that includes Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, and Chris Burden, Abramovic created some of the most historic early performance pieces. Of these artists, she is the only one still making important durational works.
Abramovic features prominently in virtually every survey published on performance art, and her works are held in the permanent collections of many of the world's top museums, including the Musee Nationale d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In November 2005 at New York's Guggenheim Museum, Abramovic staged a landmark weeklong series of performances entitled Seven Easy Pieces. Her twelve-day 'living installation', The House with the Ocean View was on numerous critics' lists as the best exhibition of 2002, and she was awarded the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennale for her video installation/performance Balkan Baroque.