Marina Abramović
The Urgent Dance
1996
€3200,00
Silkscreen print, framed
127.5 x 74.1 cm
Edition of 150, numbered and signed by the artist
In stock
about this work
Marina Abramović’s The Urgent Dance was created in 1996 as a performance at the opening of her exhibition at the Ghent Museum of Contemporary Art, in collaboration with the then museum director Jan Hoet. To the sound of traditional tango music, Abramović and Hoet do not so much dance as enact tableaux vivants, striking somewhat dramatic poses within a golden frame. These embody not only the tension between two bodies, but also between two roles and two forms of authority. By drawing Hoet, one of the most powerful figures in the art world of his time, into the work itself, Abramović made institutional power part of the medium. After the performance, the audience was invited to join the dance, definitively dismantling the strict hierarchy between artist, institution and viewer. This silkscreen print with the same title was made that same year as a document of this fleeting performance.
about Marina Abramović
Marina Abramović is one of the most influential performance artists of the twentieth century. Since her early seventies work in Yugoslavia, she has fundamentally reshaped the medium: the body is always both her subject and her material. She explores the physical and mental limits of endurance, using pain, exhaustion and ritual as means of emotional and spiritual transformation. Simple actions like sitting, lying down and breathing become charged with an intensity that hits the viewer directly.
From 1976 to 1988 she collaborated with the German artist Ulay in a series of performances centred on duality, physical symmetry and mutual dependency. After their separation she returned to solo work, and her attention shifted increasingly towards the relationship between artist and audience. That shift reached its apex in The Artist Is Present (MoMA, 2010), in which she sat motionless opposite a continuous stream of visitors for months on end. The work cannot exist without the presence of another person, and that principle runs through her entire practice.
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