VENICE — "Transforming Energy," a sweeping Marina Abramović retrospective that turned the Gallerie dell'Accademia into the first Italian museum ever to devote a major show to a living woman artist, has wrapped its run after more than five months, closing out alongside this year's Venice Biennale.
The exhibition, which opened May 6 to coincide with the Biennale's 61st edition, ran through this past weekend at the Accademia's galleries on the Grand Canal, according to the museum's own listing. It was timed to the Serbian-born performance artist's 80th birthday and marked the first time the institution opened both its permanent collection galleries and its temporary exhibition spaces to a single living artist's work.
Curated by Shai Baitel, artistic director of the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai, working in close collaboration with Abramović herself, the show paired decades of her performance history with new pieces made for the occasion. Visitors moved through documentation and restaged elements of landmark works including "Rhythm 0" (1974), "Imponderabilia" (1977) and "Balkan Baroque," the installation that won her the Golden Lion for best artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale.
A dialogue across five centuries
The show's most pointed gesture placed "Pietà (with Ulay)," a 1983 collaboration with her former partner and longtime creative foil Ulay, in direct view of Titian's own "Pietà," painted around 1575–76 — a pairing timed to the 450th anniversary of the Renaissance master's death, according to coverage from Finestre sull'Arte. Elsewhere, the museum gave over space to what it called "Transitory Objects" — stone and crystal-embedded structures, including beds visitors could lie on, built around Abramović's long-standing interest in what she describes as the transmission of energy between body and material.
Live performance remained part of the program throughout, including a re-staging of "Imponderabilia," the 1977 piece in which two nude performers stand in a narrow doorway, forcing visitors to choose whom to face as they squeeze past.
The Accademia, founded in the eighteenth century and best known for its collection of Venetian Renaissance masters including Titian, Tintoretto and Bellini, had never before built an exhibition of this scale around a single living artist. Museum officials framed the show as a deliberate rupture with that history, setting Abramović's body-centered performance practice against centuries of devotional painting housed in the same rooms.
No announcement has been made about the exhibition traveling to another venue. For an artist whose career has been defined by endurance — in 2010, she sat silently across from museum visitors for more than 700 hours during "The Artist Is Present" at New York's Museum of Modern Art — a five-and-a-half-month run inside one of Italy's oldest museums adds another marker to a milestone year.
