Marina Abramović - Photographs New York Thursday, April 8, 2021 | Phillips
  • Provenance

    Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    Often incorporating charged scenarios in her performance pieces, and relying upon audience participation, Marina Abramović has a profound interest in the energy harnessed within the human body. The motifs of life and death feature prominently in her performances, and Abramović uses these symbols to stimulate our senses and ultimately illuminate the possibility of spiritual transcendence.

    In Tesla Urn, part of her 2004 installation Count on Us, Abramović pays homage to Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, with whom Abramović feels a deep connection for their shared cultural background as well as their collective interest in the transferal of energy. Tesla was a pioneer in the field of wireless transmission and believed the human body was a viable conduit of electrical force and charged energy. In the photograph offered here, Abramović kneels before the urn which holds Tesla’s ashes. With her hands hovering around it, Abramović attempts to absorb the inventor’s energy. In this performance, Abramović does not physically touch the urn. Instead, she conjures an invisible field of energy – a transmission of power that flows through the human body and is ever-present in both life and death.

  • 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.

     
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140

Tesla Urn

2003
Dye destruction print.
48 5/8 x 48 5/8 in. (123.5 x 123.5 cm)
Number 3 from an edition of 5.

Estimate
$20,000 - 30,000 

Sold for $30,240

Contact Specialist

Sarah Krueger
Head of Department, Photographs

Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Deputy Chairman, Americas

 

Photographs

New York Auction 8 April 2021