On March 2, Ulay passed away and we remember the provocateur and the pioneer whose artistry came to characterize the 20th century art scene. Ulay, together with Marina Abramović, made performance art his life.
His name was a pseudonym for Frank Uwe Laysiepen, born in Germany in 1943, the son of a Nazi hierarch. He was so disturbed by his origins that he renounced his name and German nationality. At the end of the '60s, in fact, he left his wife and small son to move to Amsterdam, where he was initially attracted to the Dutch counter-cultural movement Provo. At the beginning of the '70s, after abandoning his artistic studies at the University, he began to take an interest in analog photography, through which he investigated the concepts of body and identity.
On November 30, 1976, Ulay met the woman who would change his life and his art forever: Marina Abramović. That day, the two artists met at the Galleria de Appel in Amsterdam and an artistic understanding was immediately born between them, which would then turn into a love story.
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Between 1976-1988, Marina and Ulay were inseparable. They traveled around Europe and communicated with each other and with outsiders through their performance works, which received the title of Relation Work. They explored boundaries around gender roles as well as physical and mental endurance.
"The pair's artistic ambiguity was something unique, which led to the two's almost iconic status as artists today," says Pontus Silfverstolpe, founder of Barnebys.
"Some couples buy pots and pans when they live together. Ulay and I started planning how to make art together."
Thus came their most famous performances, such as AAA-AAA, which explored the power of the scream, Breathing in / Breathing out, from 1977, an analysis of the duality and dependence between lovers, Imponderabilia, at the Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna, where the two artists were nude and faced themselves in a narrow doorway so visitors had to squeeze past them turning towards one or the other, Relation in time, where the two are tied by their hair, and Nightsea Crossing (1981-1987), where they sat silently facing each other on a wooden table for as long as possible.
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In 1988 the couple separated officially through the performance The Lovers. Both crossed the Great Wall of China, starting from the two opposite sides to meet halfway and say goodbye. Years of legal battles ensued for the management of the copyrights of their collaborative works.
Ulay then returned to his first passion, photography. He eschewed consumerist, "pop" themes, instead dealing with marginalization and nationalism. In 2005 he devoted himself to a project linked to water, highlighting it as a basic element of life and its beauty in all its forms, while at the same time focusing on the problem of scarce water resources. The work culminates with Earth Water Catalog, an online database that collects contributions from artists from all over the world, united by their appreciation and respect for water in their art. He also held the solo exhibition Ulay Life-Sized at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt 2016.
In 2010, Marina and Ulay met again at Marina's famous performance "The Artist is Present" at MoMA in New York. The two sat opposite each other and held hands while the audience applauded this unique reunion.
"The performance work The Artist is Present is one of the strongest and most emotionally charged works of art created during the 2000s," says Silfverstolpe. "Furthermore, thanks to the addition of the digital era, it remains still available, and is today one of the world's most viewed performance works."
The following year Ulay discovered that he had cancer. He managed to transform his diagnosis into art too, with Project Cancer, a documentary directed by Damjan Kozole, released in 2013, through which the artist traces the important places of his life and meets friends for a last farewell. Ulay died on March 2, 2020 at the age of 76 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he had lived for the last decade.
