Red, black and Marina all over

MOSCOW: 'Strictly red and black’ was the dress code and performance art the draw at the opening of Marina Abramovic’s retrospective in Moscow last night. And so the expansive foyer of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture came to resemble an avant-garde convention as all 300 attendees complied with the artist’s directive.

In the red camp was Garage patron (and now Garage magazine editor) Dasha Zhukova, dazzling in a peplum-fronted crimson velvet dress by Tom Ford; Abramovic herself and W Hotels Global Fashion Director Jenne Lombardo also wore scarlet. Revellers in black included Wendi Murdoch, artist Dinos Chapman, model Maryna Linchuk and boyfriend Salvatore Morale, who DJed the after-party.

Iconoclastic performance artist Abramovic came to Moscow to prepare her ‘The Artist is Present’ Garage show fresh from a three-month residency at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. At the end of that show, whose title Garage adopted, close friend and collaborator Riccardo Tisci threw Abramovic a party and dressed her in a gown made from the skins of 101 snakes.

Abramovic’s master works include explorations of emotional dependency and bodily pain, all of which are "reperformed" or represented through video and photographic documentation at Garage. The piece for which she may be known most widely, The House with the Ocean View, is also there. (If Carrie Bradshaw’s first date with The Russian—a midnight dinner at The Russian Samovar followed by a gallery jaunt—rings any bells, you’ll know the one.