LUXEMBOURG.- Since the late 1960s, American performance artist Eleanor Antin has challenged conventional ideas of artistic identity by inventing and embodying a range of alter egos that spanned genders, social roles, geographies and historical periods. She refers to these personas as her ‘selves’, presenting them across diverse media, including literature, film, sculpture and more. Through these transformations, Antin explores identity as inherently fluid and performative while exposing the instability of the social structures built upon it. This perspective was instrumental in shaping the politically engaged art of the 1980s and 1990s and continues to resonate in contemporary practices.

Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean presents the first large-scale European survey of over fifty years of Eleanor Antin’s work, offering an immersive journey marked by her multidisciplinary approach. Born in New York in 1935, Antin perceived herself as an actor at an early age – a stance that would come to define her practice through invented personas and narratives. Her multidimensional projects enable profound explorations of herself and the world, in direct dialogue with her Eastern European Jewish heritage. Standing at the intersection of conceptual art, performance and second-wave feminism, Antin’s position has profoundly impacted the artistic canon of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The exhibition explores the many facets of Antin’s practice in thematic sections. In the Grand Hall, Road Movie showcases her iconic project 100 Boots, in which fifty-one black-and-white postcards were mailed to friends, artists, critics and institutions, turning the U.S. Postal Service into both medium and exhibition space. This performative piece interrogates distribution processes within the art market by rendering her series of ironic installations – starred by 100 black boots – widely accessible.

In Classification we encounter a group of early works which examine the female body and behaviour through systems of taxonomy. The second, Admiration, celebrates the overlooked women in Antin’s circle, revealing her connections to Kathy Acker, Carolee Schneemann, Martha Rosler and other feminist creatives active in New York during the 1970s.

The next two sections focus on her archetypal alter egos: in Power Antin adopts a male persona to deconstruct patriarchal structures and social hierarchies; in Pose she examines the discriminatory elitism inherent in conservative art forms, through her ‘ultrafeminine’ persona Eleonora Antonova. Finally, Melodrama immerses visitors in the artist’s autobiography through characters and narratives that draw on her ancestors and the structural violence faced by minorities.

Through these diverse manifestations, Antin’s œuvre played a crucial role in shaping the conceptual art movement of the time, which in many ways reflected and critiqued market rules dominated by large-scale paintings or sculptures stored and transported in massive crates. Conceptual art’s immaterial, reproducible and ephemeral approach – more accessible, in sum – radically shifted these rules as well as traditional ideas of ownership, value and artistic production. As a whole Eleanor Antin: A Retrospective traces the artist’s visionary journey, connecting the art scenes of New York and California and foregrounding her influence on contemporary artistic practices.

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and MOCAK The Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, and is accompanied by the most extensive monograph on the artist to date. Through this retrospective, Mudam affirms its responsibility as a public institution to critically revisit and recontextualise underrepresented feminist voices, while contributing to a more inclusive and reflective art historical discourse.

Key Themes

The emancipation of photography

Edward Weston was a pioneer—alongside Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand—in advocating photography’s emancipation from other artistic disciplines. His work is therefore essential to understanding the aesthetic and perceptual power of photography in its early days. This allows photography to express aesthetic qualities such as beauty, pain, and ugliness on the same level as painting or sculpture.

Figuration and abstraction

Weston’s technical mastery of the photographic medium led him to a formalist approach in which composition became a central element of his practice. He stripped away anecdotal details to focus on his subject with such realism—and with such exaltation of photography’s inherent two-dimensionality—that the resulting image often verged on abstraction. In doing so, the artist reveals that figuration and abstraction are not mutually exclusive, but rather perfectly compatible.

Pepper No. 30

This picture, one of Edward Weston’s most iconic photographs, was taken in early August 1930. It wasn’t the first time he had photographed a vegetable—or a pepper. The artist himself said of this image: “It is a classic, completely satisfying, —a pepper—but more than a pepper; abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter. It has no psychological attributes, no human emotions are aroused: this new pepper takes one beyond the world we know in the conscious mind.” This photograph, and Weston’s own words, highlight the innovative nature of his work, which would transcend not only modern American photography but also its European counterpart.