Art by Marina Abramović

In 2010, at MoMA, Abramović sat in a chair for 736 hours over ten weeks, silent and motionless, while strangers took turns sitting across from her, one at a time, for as long as they wanted. People wept. People proposed marriage. On day 22, her former partner and longtime collaborator Ulay sat down across from her, unannounced (they hadn't performed together in over two decades), and she broke her own rule and reached for his hands. The Artist Is Present turned a 63-year-old performance artist most of the art world already respected into someone the general public actually recognized, decades after she'd already done the work that mattered most.

That work goes back to Belgrade in the 1970s, where she grew up under a strict, medal-decorated partisan mother who reportedly enforced a curfew into Abramović's late twenties. Her early pieces tested how far a body could be pushed before something broke: running full speed into a wall repeatedly, taking pills meant to induce catatonia and seizures on stage, lying naked on a bed of ice. Rhythm 0 (1974) is the one people still argue about. She stood still in a gallery for six hours next to a table of 72 objects, including a loaded gun, and told the audience they could do anything they wanted to her, with no consequences. Someone eventually held the gun to her own hand and pulled toward her.

She's since built an institute dedicated to training other artists in what she calls "long durational work," and at 79 she's still mounting new shows. A career-spanning exhibition opened at Venice's Gallerie dell'Accademia in 2026, making her the first woman to have a solo show there in the museum's history.