Reviews of Marina Abramović at the Royal Academy of Arts

2 October 2023

Marina Abramović presents her major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts until January 2024, as the first female artist to have a solo show in the institution’s 255-year history. Spanning Abramović’s fifty decade career, the exhibition features video, sculpture, photography and live performances, restages her historic work and adapts them to suit contemporary mores. The exhibition unveils the development of her practice, featuring live works, such as Imponderabilia and Nude with Skeleton - now performed by emerging artists trained by the Marina Abramović Institute.

The Guardian’s art critic, Adrian Searle, writes:

“Redoubtable, indefatigable, brave and extreme, Abramović is an artist you’d want on your side in a battle… The RA show documents many of the best of her performances (“performance” is somehow an inadequate word), and restages others with the assistance of younger artists she has trained. Since the early 1970s, Abramović has at times risked her health, her sanity and even her life in what I can only think of as a series of self-imposed tests of human endurance and persistence.

… If Abramović is sculpting anything, it is her life, reworking it as an ongoing performance, with or without all the stand-ins, actors, theatre productions and films. Abramović persists, and she has created a tremendous legacy. Over the decades the now 76-year-old “grandmother of performance art” has seduced audiences and produced an art of genuine confrontation. We are less an audience than witnesses to the best of her art. It isn’t over yet.”

Read Searle’s review here.

The exhibition has been accompanied by further reviews, commentaries and interviews internationally, including:

The Observer
‘I wake up happy! I’m singing all day’: Marina Abramović on pain, love – and her recent brush with death

Harper’s Bazaar
Higher Plane: Marina Abramović

Evening Standard 4*
Marina Abramović at the Royal Academy review: nudity, danger and a whiff of woowoo

BBC Radio 4 Front Row
Marina Abramovic and The Long Shadow reviewed, Dmitry Glukhovsky's The White Factory

AnOther Magazine
On Life and Death: Marina Abramović and Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation

Time Out 4*
Marina Abramović review

iNews 4*
Marina Abramović, Royal Academy, review: Brave, brilliant retrospective from the artist-shaman of our times

Independent 4*
Marina Abramović, Royal Academy review: world-famous artist’s early work electrifies in this once-in-a-lifetime show

Culture Whisper 5*
Marina Abramovic, Royal Academy of Arts, review

New York Times
Marina Abramovic Relents and Adapts a Provocative Piece for Today