framed chromogenic print from an edition of 9 + 2 Artist’s Proofs

Artwork date: 2009
Exhibited: Another example from this edition exhibited at Art Basel Hong Kong 17, Hong Kong, The Sean Kelly Gallery booth, 23–25 March 2017. cf. Golden Mask video Installation exhibited at The Sean Kelly Gallery, New York City, Personal Archaeology, 8 May – 19 June 2010.
Literature: Marina Abramovic: Personal Archaeology’, (2010). Aesthetica Magazine, May 2010, another example from this edition illustrated in colour. Online version of article available at: http://www. aestheticamagazine.com/marina-abramovicpersonal- archaeology/ Boshears, B. (2011). ‘Marina Abramovic: What Is Present When the Artist is Absent?’. BURNAWAY, another example from this edition illustrated in colour. Online version of article available at: http://burnaway.org/review/marina-abramovicwhat- is-present-when-the-artist-is-absent/ Syme, R. (2016). ‘All of Her’. New Republic Magazine, another example from this edition illustrated in colour. Online version of article available at: https://newrepublic.com/ article/137113/ Williams, W. (2011). ‘A Few Questions with Marina Abramovic’. Creative Loafing Magazine, another example from this edition illustrated in colour. Online version of article accessed at: http://www.creativeloafing.com/news/arti cle/13058623/a-few-questions-with-marinaabramovic

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127 x 127 cm

Notes:

Marina Abramović is one of the world’s highest profile living artists, having carved out a particular niche in performance art since the early 1970s. Born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, she began performing as soon as she had left university. Her work throughout her career has been marked by the concepts of ritual, the limits of human physical experience and social ethics all being put to varying degrees of extreme test. In this her performance work joins an outlier lineage of body performance artists prominent from the 1960s onwards.Her most celebrated and discussed work in recent years was the amazingly disciplined ritual of The Artist is Present (2010) at MoMA in New York, staged over three months. The work comprised the non-invasive but total engagement with each audience member, locked in eye contact as they sat opposite her at a staged seating arrangement in the gallery space. The encounter between artist and spectator is enacted here as a simple gaze, but echoes far more constrained, even dangerous, encounters with the Other in previous performances.The work currently on auction is contemporaneous with the MoMA show, with the editioned prints of Golden Mask from 2009 accompanied by a video performance of the same work, with the same title, released in 2010. The arduous and physically confrontational nature of the performance work is here replaced by an aesthetic of portraiture, the artist’s face covered in illuminated gold leaf ineluctably attracting the spectator’s gaze. The conceit of a beautiful, glittering golden mask, and the frank, unblinking stare with which Abramović challenges the viewer, throw into relief once more the relay between the work of art, the artist’s body and the spectator that has over the years formed her chief subject matter. The presence of such a major contemporary international work on auction in the South African market is cause for much excitement and anticipation.

James Sey