"Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present" at the MoMA

NYC's Museum of Modern Art is currently exhibiting a performance retrospective that traces the career of bountiful Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramović. "The Artist is Present" (which runs through May 31st) displays fifty works that span over four decades - including the artist's early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances and collaborative performance made with Ulay (AKA Uwe Laysiepen).

The exhibition marks three important "firsts" (one for the museum and two for the artist). These include: the first time the MoMA has devoted a retrospective to a living artist; the first live re-performances of Abramović's works by other people ever to be performed in a museum setting; and a new piece by the artist that marks the longest original solo performance Abramović has ever created and executed.

In order to allow visitors the chance the experience the timelessness of the works in the exhibition, all performances in "the Artist is Present" will take place throughout the entire duration of the exhibition - starting before the museum opens each day and continuing until after it closes.

Additionally, a chronological installation of the artist's work will run concurrently (on the sixth floor of the MoMA), revealing different modes of representing, documenting and exhibiting Abramović's ephemeral, time-based and media-based works.

Click here to read more about the exhibition (and to view Abramović's first performance)

Click here for related exhibitions at the MoMA

Pipilotti Rist's First Solo Exhibition and First Video

© 2008 Pipilotti Rist, courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, and Hauser & Wirth

Pipilotti Rist, still from "Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)" (2008)

Swiss artist, Pipilotti Rist, whose real name is Elizabeth Charlotte, had her first solo exhibition in 1984, when she transformed Vienna’s Galerie Prottore/Stauraum into a bank branch. But, it was her first video, I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), that really helped jump start her career. In the video she repeatedly sings an adaptation of a lyric from the Beattles song Happiness is a Warm Gun, while romping around in a black dress with her breasts exposed. She has continued to incorporate the female protagonist, nudity, and music throughout her career.

Recent exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.