Marina Abramović - Photographs New York Tuesday, October 3, 2017 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

  • Literature

    The Museum of Modern Art, Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, cover

  • Catalogue Essay

    Considered one of the pioneers of performance art, Marina Abramović has fashioned her body as both subject and medium throughout her career. Exhaustively investigating her physical and mental limits, Abramović delves into concepts of endurance, human interaction and transcendence. Abramović, like many performance artists, captures these ephemeral artworks through photography. Portrait with Firewood however, strays from Abramović’s traditional practice. Rather than documenting a particular performance, the image represents the daily arduous efforts of millions of women worldwide to provide life-sustaining fire for their homes. Abramović used the proceeds from the sale of this edition to support her groundbreaking retrospective ‘The Artist is Present’ at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2010.

  • Artist Biography

    Marina Abramović

    Serbian • 1946

    Marina Abramovic is celebrated as a pioneering practitioner of performance art, best known for her works that explore the physical limitations of the body, as well as the body’s potential as a vehicle to spiritual metamorphosis. Born in Belgrade, Abramovic studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade and in Zagreb, Croatia. She was among the first generation of performance artists of the 1970s, a group that often resorted to using their own bodies as an artistic medium. Her works often explore extremes of sensation, and, frequently, the audience is invited to participate in the intense, and often exhausting, painful performances. She later regularly collaborated with German artist Ulay on other performative works, exploring the capacities of the body, as well as constructions of gender and social systems in their pieces.

    She also began traveling around the world to perform, exploring the body and nature as a means of achieving spiritual transformation, in locations ranging from the Gobi Desert to the Tibetan mountains, and the Great Wall of China. Abramovic’s presentations of her work include sound, video, photography, language, and sculpture, in addition to using her body as the central medium for her work. She has exhibited her work at the Venice Biennale, where she won a Golden Lion award in 1997, and at Documenta in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Art Basel in Switzerland, and the Kumamoto Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan, among many other venues.

    She currently lives and works in Amsterdam and New York.

     
    View More Works

326

Portrait with Firewood

2009
Archival pigment print, flush-mounted.
39 1/4 x 39 1/4 in. (99.7 x 99.7 cm)
Overall 54 3/4 x 54 3/4 in. (139.1 x 139.1 cm)

Signed and dated in ink by the artist, printed title, date and number 19/30 on a certificate of authenticity accompanying the work.

Estimate
$25,000 - 35,000 

Sold for $32,500

Contact Specialist
Sarah Krueger
Head of Department, Photographs

Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Deputy Chairman, Americas

General Enquiries:
+1 212 940 1245

Photographs

New York 3 October 2017