The Serbian performance artist is the first woman to have a solo show in the Royal Academy’s main galleries – a telling indictment of the hurdles faced by female artists today
At the Royal Academy, from Saturday until New Year’s Day, the artist Marina Abramović will be present. Or rather, her work will be, as part of a retrospective taking in her half-century career. Abramović is a worthy subject for a major solo show at such a prestigious institution. Through the likes of Rhythm 0 (1974), during which she laid out 72 objects (including a gun and a bullet) and put herself at the mercy of her audience, to the intensely moving and intimate The Artist Is Present (2010) at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, she has redefined the parameters of performance art. But here is the ludicrous and infuriating thing: hers will be the first solo show by a woman at the academy’s main galleries.
“The fact that in 255 years there has been no woman showing solo in this big space makes it a huge responsibility,” she told an interviewer last month. A couple of years ago she described the pressure she felt as a prominent artist in a male-dominated scene: “I have to make work that’s so good that it opens the road for all the young and incredibly talented female artists coming after me. If my show is not good then it will reflect badly on everybody else, so I have to be incredible.”
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