Marina Abramovic’s ‘Transforming Energy’ Makes History at Venice’s Accademia
The museum’s first landmark solo celebrating a living woman artist.
Summary
- Renowned artist Marina Abramović just opened Transforming Energy at Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, marking the museum’s first major solo dedicated to a living woman
- Running concurrent to the Venice Biennale, the exhibition puts the artist’s most pioneering works in direct dialogue with Renaissance masterworks
- New pieces and performances, alongside her “Transitory Objects” stone and crystal series is also on view
Marina Abramović is a figure of firsts for Venice. The artist fell in love with the city as a teenager on a trip to the Biennale, where she would later become the first woman to take home a Golden Lion in 1997 for her blood and bones performance, “Balkan Baroque.”
As she enters her 80th year, she touches down again, this time for the history-making Transforming Energy at Gallerie dell’Accademia, the institution’s first major honoring a living woman artist. Curated by Shai Baitel, the exhibition presents Abramovic’s pioneering performance artworks against the gravitas of Renaissance masterworks, cementing her legacy in Venice, a city that she’s always kept close to heart.
Central to the show is a staging of “Pietá (with Ulay)” (1983) beside Titian’s 16th-century original in a cross-century dialogue of grief and transcendence. Abramović’s fascination endurance, participation and spiritual transformation also takes shape in “Transitory Objects,” an interactive series of stone and crystal beds where visitors are invited to lie down, sit, or stand on these pieces to activate “energy transmissions.”
Elsewhere, iconic performances, from “Rhythm 0” (1974) to “Balkan Baroque” (1997), are presented alongside new works created for the exhibition.
As the musuem’s director, Giulio Manieri Elia stated in a recent interview, the space itself has been recalibrated to, in true Abramović fashion, “create an atmosphere that brings us closer to meditation and away from everyday life.”
Transforming Energy is now on view in Venice through October 19
Gallerie dell’Accademia
Calle della Carità, 1050,
30123 Venezia VE, Italy
