Portrait of Marina Abramović is a continuation of a series of blind painting performances, which Mike Parr started to create in 2019. Parr’s blindness is self-imposed with the artist performing with his eyes closed from the moment of entering to the moment of exiting the performance. He will never see the work. Blind painting is an attempt at nothingness and creation and toward an ending and rebirth.
For 12 hours, Parr will paint 4 black squares and then 4 red squares over black squares followed again by black squares over red squares. He will repeat this alternating pattern working across a large-scale structure in Space Theatre. The black refers to Kazimir Malevich, whose Black Square (1915) embodied a refusal of Western painting, while the red references Abramović’s use of red in association with her ex-Yugslavian communist background. In this action, Parr is interested in the complexity and tensions in art’s ambiguity, performativity, and afterlives.
