Marina Abramovic. Early Works

About

They will be presented with screenings of five of the artist’s earliest films (1975-1977). The exhibition of these rarely seen works, most of which are now in museums, celebrates the pioneering legacy of Abramović, who is internationally recognized as the most significant figure in the history of performance art; it also acknowledges the three-decade professional collaboration between Marina Abramović and Sean Kelly. This will be the artist’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery.

The performances documented in these early editions represent the nucleus of the canon Abramović has expanded upon and explored in her practice over the ensuing forty-plus years.  At the time Abramović carried out these actions in galleries and art festivals throughout Europe, before very limited audiences, she was a young artist teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Serbia.  These first solo performances tested the limits of physical endurance, exploring ritual, gesture, even pain to interrogate the parameters of art and challenge the fundamental relationship between performer and audience.

Each edition is comprised of black and white photographs accompanied by text panels that provide a narrative of the event depicted. Issued in 1994 in editions of 16, these works were the result of years of extensive dialogue between Abramović and Kelly to both preserve and conserve the original negatives that Abramović had carried around for years in a backpack whilst living out of a van and which were rapidly degrading. Abramović and Kelly worked carefully to choose a key image for each work, aware that once disseminated to a wider public, their selection would become the iconic representation of these historic, yet transient actions. 

Also on view are longer format films that document performances in which Abramović, both in solo works and works in collaboration with Ulay, challenged the boundaries of her strength, endurance, and mental strength. In Freeing the Body, 1975, for instance, the artist—nude with her head shrouded in a black cloth—dances to the rhythm of an African Drummer over a period of eight hours, her energy visibly draining until she collapses to the floor. In these earliest manifestations and in all her ensuing performances, Abramović has traversed the limits of consciousness through extreme ritualistic acts.  Marina Abramović Early Works offers a concise and compelling survey of some of these first audacious actions, which have in turn become among the most essential and influential in the annals of the history of performance art.