Marina Abramović at the Royal Academy review

Exhibition looks back at the spectacular highlights of her five-decade career

A still from Marina Abramović's video 'The Kitchen – Levitation' (detail), 2009
A still from Marina Abramović's video 'The Kitchen – Levitation' (detail), 2009
(Image credit: Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives / Marina Abramović)

Since the early 1970s, the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović has "risked her health, her sanity and even her life" in the service of her art, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. "Performance" is somehow an inadequate word for her work, "a series of self-imposed tests of human endurance and persistence": she has "burned herself, cut herself, drugged herself"; she has provided the audience with a hammer, a saw, chains and a whip, and asked them to do what they want with her; she has sat for 75 days, in silence, at New York's MoMA. 

Her "relentless" new exhibition looks back at the spectacular and often terrifying highlights of her five-decade career. The show – shockingly, the first retrospective ever given to a female artist at the Royal Academy – consists of videos and photographs of some of her performances, and re-enactments of others, staged "with the assistance of younger artists she has trained". Now 76, the "grandmother of performance art", as she calls herself, has created a "tremendous legacy" – and this show does it justice. 

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