Eleanor Antin

Her many one-person exhibitions include shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum, and a major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which traveled to St. Louis and toured the UK. As both a performing and exhibiting artist, she has appeared in venues around the world, including the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennale and Opera House, and Documenta 12.

She created a number of works that are considered classics of conceptual feminist art today, such as "CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture,” “100 BOOTS,” and her three personas (the King, the Ballerina, and the Nurse), realized in a wide variety of media. For the last two decades, she has been working on rearticulating historical narratives, both real and fictitious. She has created large photographic tableaux of narrative and allegorical scenes from an imagined ancient Rome, such as “The Last Days of Pompeii,” that explore the tropes of feminist and conceptual art. She has written, directed, and produced many videotapes and films, among them the cult feature, “The Man Without a World” (1991), which was screened at the Berlin Film Festival, the U.S.A. Film Festival, the Ghent Film Festival, the London Jewish Film Festival, etc.

Her work is represented in many major public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Beaubourg, the Verbund Collection, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has written six books: “BEING ANTINOVA” (Astro Artz), “ELEANORA ANTINOVA PLAYS” (Sun & Moon), “100 BOOTS” (Running Press), “MAN WITHOUT A WORLD: a Screenplay” (Green Integer, Sun & Moon Press), and “CONVERSATIONS WITH STALIN” (Green Integer). Her book “An Artist’s Life by Eleanora Antinova” was published by Hirmerverlag, Munich, along with a re-publication of “Being Antinova.” Major monographs on her work include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “ELEANOR ANTIN,” "HISTORICAL TAKES” (Prestel), and “MULTIPLE OCCUPANCY: ELEANOR ANTIN’S SELVES” (Columbia University, NY). She has received many awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 from the Women’s Caucus of the College Art Association, two Best Show AICA Awards (International Association of Art Critics), a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Media Achievement Award, and an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego.

Antin participated in numerous landmark group exhibitions, including “The Feminist Revolution” at MOCA, Los Angeles; MoMA PS1, New York; and the Vancouver Art Gallery, as well as “ELLES” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Antin is represented in major public collections, including those of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy.

Antin's performance and filmic work was presented in Europe in the early 1970s at Galleria Forma in Genoa.

Erna Hecey Gallery in Brussels presented three large solo exhibitions: “100 Boots” (selected as one of the five best exhibitions in Belgium in 2006), “Empire of Signs” (2007), and “Historical Takes” (2009-2010). Her work was also featured in several group exhibitions at the gallery, including “Strange, Familiar and Unforgotten” (2005), “Drawing in Expanded Field” (2009), an exhibition in Cologne with Marcel Broodthaers, Peter Friedl, and Ryan Gander (2010), and “Thinking Ahead” (2018) at Erna Hecey, Luxembourg. In 2022, Erna Hecey presented her 1987 film, “From the Archives of Modern Art,” at Offscreen, Paris.

Antin was part of Documenta 12 in 2007.

Her large photographic tableaux of narrative and allegorical scenes were included in “History Tales” at the Kunstsammlungen der Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna, Austria (September 23, 2023 - May 5, 2024) and in “Foto Kunst Foto, from Julia Margaret Cameron to Thomas Ruff” at the Clemens Sels Museum, Neuss, Germany (October 27, 2024 - February 23, 2025)*.

Mudam Luxembourg presents her first complete retrospective in Europe, “Eleanor Antin: A Retrospective,” from September 25, 2025, to February 8, 2026.