Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, who has been a defining figure in the art world since the late 1960s, is experiencing unprecedented popularity with comprehensive exhibitions of her life's work spanning major cities including Copenhagen, Stockholm, Bonn, Florence, Belgrade, London, Amsterdam, and Zurich. The artist has received prestigious honors including the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and most recently the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, often called the Nobel Prize of the arts. Now, Vienna's Albertina Modern presents a captivating and disturbing retrospective that showcases her complete body of work.
Abramović's evolution of body art since the modern era can be understood as a dual compensatory process. Using the body as material and inscribing all her performance works with a literally physical-haptic element was, in the 1960s and 1970s, the exact opposite of the then-dominant bloodless minimal art and abstraction. For her inner self and emotional life, it likely represents an osmotic exchange and fulfillment for what was missing in her socialization by two military parents – her father was a general in the Yugoslav Army, her mother an ex-partisan and director of the War Museum – full of discipline but lacking tenderness and touch. Abramović once revealed with startling openness that she could not remember a single maternal kiss from her childhood.
The artist's dedication sometimes approaches near self-annihilation. How close the Belgrade-born Abramović came in the 1960s, in a kind of East-West artistic dialogue, to the New York body art of pioneer Bruce Nauman and its destructive parallel in Viennese Actionism of Rudolf Schwarzkogler or Günther Brus, is now documented in this consistently gripping and disturbing exhibition of her complete works at Vienna's Albertina Modern. The Abramović method extends to direct imitation of important performances by Nauman, as well as by Joseph Beuys (whom she met in 1973 and to whom she owes much), Vito Acconci, and Austrian artist Valie Export. In Vienna, she has trained actors recreate both her own and Nauman's actions.
Particularly in early works, where the artist crossed many boundaries and consciously wanted to tear them down, her dedication sometimes goes almost to the point of physical extinction. In her 1974 performance "Rhythm 0" at Studio Morra in Naples, she offered her body in a way that connected the fundamental sacrifice concept of Christianity – her grandparents were strictly religious and shaped her – with the Italian genius loci of Leonardo's Last Supper in Milan's Santa Maria delle Grazie refectory. Instead of Christ behind the veiled sacrificial table, she stood defenseless in the video of the action as object and victim like the Son of God in the room.
On a table with pure white linen lay 72 objects including grapes, a rose, and a feather, but also instruments of torture such as scissors, knives, and even a pistol. Gallery visitors could freely decide, according to the instructions, what they wanted to do with the motionless body that offered no resistance – either use the instruments against her or caress her; only the artist would be responsible. As in Stanley Milgram's violence experiments of the 1960s, the lack of responsibility led to the worst excesses. Previously inconspicuous citizens suddenly maltreated the artist with knives, beat and scratched her with rose thorns, or cut her hair with scissors, so that at the end of the performance, Abramović appeared completely dazed like Christ as the Man of Sorrows. It's hard to fathom how quickly every veneer of civility broke away. Not a single willing executor in Naples came up with the idea of stroking Abramović with the feather or feeding her the grapes.
"Rhythm 0" also shows that Abramović is strongest where she pairs her very own access to the innermost through destruction of the surface with age-old pathos formulas of Christianity. In "Imponderabilia," she stood facing her art and life partner Ulay naked like a Greek kore in the doorway, never breaking eye contact. Even the slimmest gallery visitor had to penetrate this zone of utmost intimacy when entering the room and brush against both naked bodies. In another room, she screams or dances until her voice and body fail, with signs of Dionysian disinhibition appearing on her otherwise always controlled face, reminiscent of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's physiognomy studies.
Abramović has often been accused of over-dramatizing self-torture, and indeed she makes abundant use of Christian pathos formulas of pain. On the other hand, massacres like those in the Yugoslav War cannot be endured without transformation into symbol-laden images, and even the visual metamorphosis of violence remains disturbing. The Albertina exhibition scenically presents the mountain of bones on whose peak Abramović sat in the 1997 action "Balkan Baroque" like in an oversized baroque vanitas still life, apathetically scrubbing flesh from bones for days.
How much all of this represents internal balancing processes that every viewer can immediately understand is evident in the 2012 work "Artist Portrait with a Candle." Against a pitch-black background, Abramović sits alone with a candle in her hand like the reader in Gerhard Richter's meditative painting. The absolute silence is deafening. This palpable listening inward and self-reflection, along with Abramović's meditative great march on the Chinese Wall after separating from partner Ulay, marks a stylistic change toward more calm and interiority. Total physical expenditure has since been replaced by psychological intensification, which culminated in the 2010 work "The Artist is Present."
If the eyes and their all-penetrating gaze were already the periscope from the impenetrable body armor, she perfected Dürer's idea of eyes as windows to the soul in this action. For over three months, Abramović sat in New York's MoMA every day for eight hours, facing a total of 1,500 visitors and looking continuously into their eyes until they could no longer withstand the piercing intensity, fled, or broke into tears. In Vienna, both photographic portraits and videos of these brave sparring partners of the gaze can be seen, who had little to oppose her tremendous physical and spiritual discipline.
Perhaps because her boundary crossings remained purely physical for so long, she has transferred much into psychological symbolism in recent years. Two rooms in Vienna are filled with crystal benches and portals that, like "Imponderabilia," are to be passed through to experience spiritual purification and healing. This may sound too esoteric, but the fact remains that the skillfully arranged and spatially generous Viennese tour through the life and work of Marina Abramović amounts to purification and revelation even without crystals.
The Marina Abramović exhibition runs at Vienna's Albertina Modern until March 1, 2026, with the catalog priced at 49.90 euros.
