Abramovic & Ulay Friday/Saturday Series (seven works), 1986 Polaroid 24 x 20 inches (60.9 x 50.8 cm) (Image, each... (Total: 7 Items)
Auction amount: $30,000.00
Sold: May 22, 2017
Marina Abramovic (Yugoslavian, b.1946)
Art
Birth Place: Belgrade (Serbia, Serbia and Montenegro)
Biography:
Who is Marina Abramovic?
Marina Abramovicis a Serbian performance, video, and installation artist, born 1946, active in the Netherlands.
Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic was born into a family of devout socialists, and she found inspiration from her grandmother and great-grandfather who were practitioners of Greek Orthodoxy. To Abramovic, there was something beautiful in their spirituality. She writes that as she began to develop her passion for performance, she leaned into the strength of her parents, the spirituality of her grandmother, and the love of her audience.
Abramovic's early work from the 1970's is powerful, youthful, and provocative, particularly the performance pieces in which she used her body as the medium. Configuring her body in painful or awkward positions, she created a dialogue with her audience about boundaries, violence, and vulnerability. She claimed that these performances were neither feminist nor political, rather meant to evoke a more general belief that pain associated with endurance can be the door to self-knowledge: "An artist should suffer, and from the suffering comes the best work. Suffering brings transformation and through the suffering an artist transcends their spirit."
By 1988, Abramovic had separated from her longtime partner and collaborator, Ulay. Their final piece, The Lovers, was both an ending and a beginning for Abramovic. She reflected, "An artist should not lie, steal, compromise, kill, worship idol, and above all love another artist." After their breakup and during her time in China, she began to focus on her spiritual self. While walking on the Great Wall of China, she felt something "new and different," brought on by the minerals in the earth. She sought to recreate this sensation in her next solo exhibition, after nearly twelve years; after extensive research into Tibetan and Chinese medicine, she formulated a system of correspondence between minerals and parts of the body, calling her new pieces "transitory objects." Unlike her early "body works," which accentuate violence and conflict, her "transitory objects" unify body and earth and connote euphoria and clarity.
While in her seventies, Abramovic began reflecting on the importance of time and developed the "Abramovic Method," a culmination of her 40 years of performance. In this method, she reverses the traditional roles of the viewer and the performer and calls upon the viewer to become the artist. For example, she claims that "we are all warriors" and "the planet is dying," urging viewers to participate in changing destiny with Zen-inspired mindfulness.Heritage Auctions, the world's third largest auction house, brings decades of experience and connoisseurship to the fine art world. From Old Masters to contemporary works, our specialists help collectors understand and appreciate art and as the best place to sell fine art, we help sellers achieve the highest prices in the market.
