World famous performance artist Marina Abramović at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam next year

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam will host next year a major solo exhibition of the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović. The museum announced on Monday that the exhibition will run from Saturday, March 16 to Sunday, July 14.

The exhibition will showcase Abramović's entire body of work. Often referred to as the “Godmother of Performance Art,” she started her career in the 1970s in former Yugoslavia. She moved to Amsterdam in 1976 and gained significant recognition for the groundbreaking and provocative works she produced alongside her then-partner, the German-Dutch artist Ulay in the 1970s and 1980s, such as "Imponderabilia" and "Relation in Time." Their work often explored physical endurance, duality, and identity. After parting ways with him in 1988, she shifted focus to her solo career.

Her work typically involves exploring the limits of the body and mind, the nature of pain and endurance, and the complex relationship between the performer and the audience. Her most well-known pieces include "Rhythm 0" (1974), where she passively allowed audience members to use any of 72 objects on her body in any way they desired, and "The Artist Is Present" (2010), where she engaged in a prolonged silent stare with individual museum visitors. For this piece, Abramović sat on a chair six days a week for three months at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, inviting individuals to sit opposite her and maintain eye contact for as long as they desired. In total, she spent over 700 hours sitting silently on the chair.

The solo exhibition is organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in London. After the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the exhibition will be displayed at the Kunsthaus Zürich, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Kunstforum Vienna.

In October 2022, Abramović spent more than a week at the Royal Theatre Carré in Amsterdam with her performance "No Intermission," which was created explicitly for the Amsterdam theater.