Marina Abramović

There are many reasons why Marina Abramović’s major exhibition in the Royal Academy is important and the fact that it is the artist’s largest one in the UK to date is certainly amongst the most significant ones. It is also, since its opening in 1768, the first solo exhibition held in the Main Galleries by a female artist. It took 255 years and three waves of feminism for this reputable institution to open the gates of its most representative space to a woman - an icon, a pioneer, an internationally acclaimed performance artist who for over 50 years of her career never once stopped experimenting and challenging her own limits and those of her audience, yet still a woman. Adrian Heathfield argues that her life-long work and especially renowned shows in New York’s Guggenheim and MoMA held at the beginning of the twenty-first century, earned her a ‘global, cultural popularity experienced by only a handful of (still mostly male) artists’ (Royal Academy of Arts (RA), 2023 p.43) and subsequently enabled the Royal Academy show. Another reason of the exhibition’s importance lays in the fact that it presents Abramović, a Serbian born in 1946 in former Yugoslavia, not only as a performance artist but as a multidisciplinary one, who utilises photography, video, sculpture, drawing, installation, and other means to explore ‘art as a vehicle for emotional and spiritual transformation’ (RA, 2023 p.4).