Ulay began his artistic career as a photographer
Ulay was born Frank Uwe Laysiepen on 30 November 1943 in a bunker in Solingen. He was 14 when his father died, and his mother increasingly withdrew from life. After an apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer, he began a photography course in 1962, graduating in 1968. It was as a photographer that he collected his first artistic experiences, in the fields of experimental photography and the environment, in particular. To pursue his dream of a free artist’s life, he left his wife and son and travelled to Amsterdam, where his photo projects focused on people on the margins of society, including the homeless, transsexuals and drug addicts. A further subject from this milieu at this time was tattoos, which the artist documented in edited Polaroid shots.
Art theft as sensational performance
In 1976, Ulay drew much public attention when the painting Der arme Poet (The Poor Poet) by the Late Romantic Carl Spitzweg (1808-1885) was stolen from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and was hung in the flat of a Turkish immigrant family in Kreuzberg to draw attention to their living conditions. After around 30 hours, Ulay ended his action Da ist eine kriminelle Begegnung in der Kunst and returned the picture to the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. He received a fine for the theft which he refused to pay, and thus left Germany. On his return, he was arrested for the outstanding payment, but was released after friends settled the bill for him.
Spectacular collaboration with Marina Abramović
Ulay achieved worldwide fame through his collaboration with the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović (born 1946), with whom he was also in a private relationship for a time. During their first joint performance at the Venice Biennale in 1976, the artists collided their naked bodies for 58 minutes. The couple shared their highs and lows with the public, and even their separation became a major art event: as part of The Great Wall Walk in 1988, they walked around 2,500 kilometres from different directions towards each other for three months, bidding each other an exhausted and public farewell. Their joint success also became Ulay's undoing: as a solo artist, he was never able to free himself from the shadow of his overpowering partner.
A solo career in the shadow of earlier success
From the 1990s, Ulay worked increasingly once again as a photographer. From 1999 to 2004, he held a professorship at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. In 2010, he unexpectedly took part in his former partner Marina Abramović's permanent performance The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which moved her to tears and delighted the audience. In 2015, the divorced artist couple met in court due to copyright disputes, only reconciling in 2017.
Ulay died in Ljubljana in Slovenia on 2 March 2020.
Ulay - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
