A career-spanning exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia during the Venice Biennale is not a bad way to celebrate an 80th birthday. Come May of next year, this is how Marina Abramović, perhaps the most well-known performance artist, will ring in her eighth decade.
The show “Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy” will be on view at the Accademia from May 6–October 19, 2026. It coincides with the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale, which opens May 9.
“Transforming Energy” previously appeared at the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai in fall 2024. That show featured 150 artworks, many of which are furniture/sculpture hybrids featuring materials like quartz, amethyst, and tourmaline.
Abramović reportedly first visited the Venice Biennale with her mother, traveling from her native Serbia to the Italian city in 1960. “[Venice] was so incredibly beautiful—unlike anything I had ever seen,” Abramović told Artnet. “Since then, returning to Venice has become a tradition, and after receiving the Golden Lion in 1997, the city has always held a special place in my life.”
At the Accademia, Abramović’s “transitory objects” (a phrase the artist prefers over sculpture, “because the object is not the point; the energy is,” as she explained to Art in America last year) will be installed throughout the 14th-century building among the museum’s permanent collection. The Accademia has hosted contemporary exhibitions before—most recently Anish Kapoor’s in 2022—but this is the first time a contemporary artist’s work will be in dialogue with the Accademia’s trove of Renaissance paintings by artists like Titian, Tintoretto, Giorgione, and Mantegna.
Perhaps the most dramatic pairing will be Abramović’s 1983 photograph Pietà (with Ulay), in which she cradles her former partner and collaborator’s body across her lap while wearing a red strapless dress shown alongside Titian’s last painting, Pietà (1575–76).
