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Power 100

Most influential people in 2018 in the contemporary artworld

44

Joan Jonas

Artist - Legendary video and performance artist

44 in 2018

  • 201844
  • 201714
  • 2016
  • 2015
  • 2014
  • 2013
  • 2012
  • 2011
  • 2010
  • 2009
  • 2008
  • 2007
Joan Jonas. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York & Rome

This year’s retrospective of Jonas’s work at Tate Modern offered belated recognition of the veteran artist’s influence and a reminder, in the premiere of a new performance, that she has no intention of letting up. Jonas’s heroic status among a younger generation of artists preoccupied by ecological disaster, body politics and interspecies communication has only recently been matched by an elevation to superstardom. Which has good and bad sides: in June, she was announced as the winner of the 2018 Kyoto Prize, worth roughly $900,000; in August, Munich’s Haus der Kunst announced that a budget shortfall meant that her Tate show would not travel to Germany. If it seems odd that an artist who for so long made and exhibited work on the margins should now outstrip the resources of a major institution, then a show at Amanda Wilkinson, London, confirmed that Jonas’s best work is still raw, rickety and intimate. 

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