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Ulay

Frank Uwe Laysiepen (1943 – 2 March 2020), known professionally as Ulay, was a German performance and conceptual artist who pioneered performative photography using Polaroid technology and explored the human body as a medium in radical actions.^[1]^[2] Born in Solingen amid World War II air raids, he relocated to Amsterdam in the late 1960s, immersing himself in countercultural groups like the Provos before developing his early works involving mirrors, light, and self-portraiture to interrogate identity and perception.^[3]^[4] Ulay achieved lasting recognition through his 12-year artistic and personal partnership with Marina Abramović, commencing in 1976, which produced the "Relation Works" series of performances examining interpersonal energy, space, and physical limits via mirrored movements and confrontational stasis, including Imponderabilia (1977), where the duo stood nude as human doorframes in a gallery entrance, and Rest Energy (1980), involving a drawn bow and arrow aimed at Abramović's heart to test trust and peril.^[5]^[6] Their collaboration concluded with The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk (1988), a grueling trek from opposite ends of China's Great Wall to a central rendezvous, marking both geographic feat and relational dissolution after over a decade of nomadic cohabitation in a Volkswagen van.^[7] Post-separation, Ulay pursued independent projects addressing cultural memory, indigenous rights, and environmental concerns, such as protesting the demolition of Berlin's Palast der Republik, while later securing legal victories against Abramović for unauthorized commercial use of their joint oeuvre.^[8] He established the Ulay Foundation in 2019 to safeguard his archives amid health decline, succumbing in Ljubljana, Slovenia, to lymphatic cancer complications at age 76.^[9]^[10]^[11]

Early Life and Influences

Childhood and Formative Experiences

Frank Uwe Laysiepen, professionally known as Ulay, was born on November 30, 1943, in a bomb shelter in Solingen, Germany, during an Allied air raid targeting the city's steel industry.^[12]^[13] Solingen, situated in the industrial North Rhine-Westphalia region near the Ruhr Valley, endured significant wartime destruction as a hub for metalworking and armaments production, with reconstruction efforts dominating the immediate postwar years.^[13]^[14] Ulay's early years unfolded amid Germany's societal reckoning with defeat, denazification, and economic recovery, where open discussion of World War II experiences remained taboo in many households, including his own.^[15] His father, Wilhelm Laysiepen, a Wehrmacht officer who had fought in both world wars, suffered lasting health effects from his service and died in 1958 when Ulay was 14, exacerbating family withdrawal as his mother, Hildegard, became emotionally insular.^[12]^[4] This paternal loss, compounded by the war's erasure of extended relatives, instilled a profound sense of solitude during his adolescence in the gritty, factory-laden environment of postwar Solingen.^[16]^[17]

Education and Initial Artistic Pursuits

Frank Uwe Laysiepen, who adopted the moniker Ulay, initially trained in engineering during the early 1960s in Germany before pivoting to artistic pursuits following a formative 1968 trip to Amsterdam, where exposure to Fluxus events and conceptual artists reshaped his direction.^[4] Seeking formal validation, he enrolled at the Art Academy in Cologne in 1969, focusing on painting and graphics owing to the lack of a dedicated photography department, but abandoned the program after roughly one and a half years, rejecting its rigid structures in favor of autodidactic methods.^[18]^[19] Throughout the late 1960s, Ulay conducted private experiments probing light, spatial dynamics, and self-identity, drawing initial inspiration from Fluxus's emphasis on ephemeral actions and interdisciplinary happenings while progressively emphasizing individual corporeal and perceptual thresholds over collective spectacle.^[18] These solitary endeavors, devoid of public presentation, underscored an emerging preoccupation with the body's material limits and subjective experience, diverging from Fluxus's often playful, anti-institutional ethos toward more introspective corporeal realism.^[4] Discontent with Germany's cultural and political milieu, particularly his unease with national identity in the post-war era, prompted Ulay's relocation to Amsterdam in the early 1970s, where the city's vibrant, less regimented art scene enabled unfettered exploration of conceptual boundaries without reliance on academic or commercial frameworks.^[4] This shift positioned him to refine precursors to performance-based photography, prioritizing personal agency over established avant-garde conventions.^[19]

Pre-Collaboration Career

Polaroid Photography Innovations

In the early 1970s, Ulay, having served as a consultant for Polaroid from 1968 to 1971, adopted instant photography as a primary medium for self-portraiture, leveraging the company's provision of unlimited film and equipment to produce unedited, immediate images that captured transient states of identity.^[2]^[18] This approach allowed for rapid documentation of personal experimentation, bypassing the delays and alterations inherent in conventional darkroom processes.^[20] Ulay's innovations centered on enlarging Polaroid outputs to life-size formats, termed "Polagrams," in which he positioned his body directly within the camera's dark space to generate full-scale, unmanipulated prints that confronted the medium's typical small-scale disposability.^[21]^[18] These works emphasized the ontological presence of the photographic image as a direct imprint of the subject's physical form, prioritizing raw immediacy over polished aesthetics and enabling explorations of bodily fluidity without external intervention.^[22] Through series like Renais sense (1972–1975), Ulay created hundreds of auto-Polaroids documenting self-modifications, including skin inscriptions, piercings, and adornments that probed the body's transformative potential.^[23]^[24] In works such as S'he (1973–1974), he assumed androgynous poses with makeup and feminine clothing to manifest a hybrid persona, using the instant print's fidelity to underscore identity's instability and the performativity of gender presentation.^[25]^[26] This empirical focus on process-oriented capture distinguished his practice, yielding images that served as verifiable records of physiological and psychological flux rather than idealized representations.^[20]

Activist Interventions and Controversies

In 1976, Ulay executed a provocative performance art action titled Irritation – There Is a Criminal Touch to Art, during which he removed Carl Spitzweg's painting The Poor Poet—noted as Adolf Hitler's favorite—from the wall of Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie on December 12.^[22]^[27] Using wire cutters, he cut the painting free, exited through an emergency door to a waiting van, and transported it to a modest apartment in the Kreuzberg district, where he hung it above the couch of a Turkish immigrant family facing socioeconomic exclusion.^[28]^[29] Ulay then contacted the museum director to disclose the painting's location, framing the act not as conventional theft but as a symbolic critique of art institutions' possessive control, their commodification of cultural heritage, and broader societal discrimination against migrant workers who were denied access to such treasures.^[12]^[30] The action, documented via Super 8 and 16mm film by collaborator Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, triggered immediate legal repercussions: Ulay was detained overnight, charged, and fined 3,600 Deutsche Marks (equivalent to about 36 days' imprisonment), though he initially skipped the trial and was later arrested in Munich, serving 10 to 14 days in detention.^[28]^[12] Supporters and friends covered the fine through donations, underscoring public sympathy for Ulay's intent to democratize art beyond elite enclosures.^[12] Media coverage amplified the stunt into tabloid scandals, igniting debates on the boundaries between criminality and artistic expression, the ethics of institutional authority over public cultural assets, and art's potential role in addressing social inequities—though these discussions yielded transient attention rather than structural reforms in museum practices or migrant inclusion policies.^[31]^[32] Ulay's intervention empirically probed personal risk and institutional reflexes, generating notoriety that propelled his visibility in the avant-garde scene but exposing the limits of such provocations: the painting was returned intact, security protocols tightened, yet core dynamics of art commercialization and exclusion persisted unchanged, highlighting provocation's capacity for spectacle over systemic disruption.^[28]^[29]

Partnership with Marina Abramović

Collaborative Performances and Conceptual Framework

Ulay and Marina Abramović initiated their artistic partnership in 1976, developing a series of performances known as "Relation Works" that systematically explored interactions between two bodies through synchronized and mirrored actions.^[33] These works emphasized physical proximity and mutual influence, often pushing participants to the limits of endurance to examine boundaries of individual identity and shared energy.^[34] Their first joint performance, Relation in Space, debuted at the 1976 Venice Biennale, where the artists repeatedly collided their bodies in a pendulum-like motion for 58 minutes, demonstrating principles of momentum and relational dynamics.^[35] In Imponderabilia (1977), performed at Galleria Studio Morra in Naples, Ulay and Abramović stood nude and facing each other across a narrow museum doorway, requiring visitors to squeeze between their bodies to enter, thus measuring audience tolerance for intimate physical confrontation over approximately 90 minutes.^[36] This piece, documented through photography, highlighted the tangible strain of immobility and the quantifiable interactions with passersby, without relying on interpretive symbolism.^[37] Similarly, Breathing In/Breathing Out (1977), first enacted in Belgrade, involved the artists kneeling face-to-face with mouths sealed together and nostrils blocked by cigarette filters, alternately inhaling and exhaling until carbon dioxide buildup caused collapse after several minutes, evidencing physiological limits through video records.^[38] Further examples include AAA-AAA (1978), in which the pair began standing apart, emitting prolonged "AAA" vocalizations that intensified as they approached until their open mouths met, sustaining the sound for up to 15 minutes to test vocal and proximity endurance, as captured in video documentation.^[39] These performances prioritized empirical bodily responses—such as vocal fatigue, respiratory distress, and spatial compression—over abstract narratives, with actions mirrored to equalize roles and dissolve distinctions between performers.^[40] The collaboration culminated in The Great Wall Walk (1988), an endurance action spanning 90 days along the Great Wall of China, with Ulay starting from the eastern endpoint at the Gulf of Bohai and Abramović from the western terminus at Jiayuguan, converging midway to mark the physical and temporal convergence of their paths, documented via film.^[7] Throughout these works, the conceptual framework centered on verifiable physical interdependencies, using mirrored protocols to quantify energy transfer and ego boundaries through measurable durations and outcomes.^[41]

Interpersonal Dynamics and Symbolic Dissolution

Ulay and Abramović established cohabitation shortly after meeting in 1976, embracing a nomadic existence that encompassed extensive travels across Europe and residency in a van while in Tibet.^[7]^[35] This peripatetic mode of living, coupled with the unrelenting physical demands of their collaborative endeavors, imposed evident strains on their interpersonal rapport, as the fusion of artistic and personal spheres intensified relational pressures over time.^[42]^[7] Their partnership evolved into a conceptual merger wherein individual identities yielded to a unified artistic persona, conceptualizing bodies as interdependent mechanisms subject to mutual testing of physiological and psychological limits.^[35] However, the cumulative toll of such immersion—manifest in sustained physical exhaustion and the erosion of personal autonomy—contributed causally to the partnership's erosion, culminating in its deliberate termination after 12 years.^[42]^[43] In 1988, they executed The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk, initiating solo treks from disparate endpoints of the Great Wall of China—Ulay from the western Juyongguan and Abramović from the eastern Shanhaiguan—for approximately 90 days each, converging midway on an unspecified date in late March for a perfunctory handshake and oral pronouncement of dissolution.^[42]^[44] This ritualistic convergence served as both symbolic closure and empirical demarcation of the relational and professional endpoint, precluding further joint ventures despite the performance's origins in an earlier, intact phase of their collaboration.^[7]^[45] Post-separation, the duo formalized a procedural accord in 1999 delineating joint attribution for co-authored pieces and allocating Ulay 20 percent of net revenues derived from their collective output, reflecting an initial consensus on equitable handling of shared intellectual property absent contemporaneous acrimony.^[46]^[47]

Post-1988 Legal and Financial Conflicts

In 1999, Ulay and Marina Abramović signed a contract stipulating that Ulay would receive 20 percent of the net income from sales of their collaborative works, defined as Abramović's gross income after deductions for taxes, agent fees, and production costs.^[48]^[47] This agreement aimed to regulate commercial exploitation of joint intellectual property following their 1988 artistic and personal separation. Disputes arose in the 2010s when Ulay alleged Abramović breached the contract by failing to pay full royalties on sales from solo exhibitions featuring their joint works and by presenting those works without proper co-authorship credit, such as in her 2010 MoMA retrospective The Artist Is Present, where collaborative pieces were attributed solely to her.^[49]^[50] Ulay claimed these actions undervalued his contributions and violated the agreement's terms on accreditation and revenue sharing. In November 2015, Ulay filed a lawsuit in Amsterdam's district court seeking enforcement of the 1999 contract, back royalties, and recognition of co-authorship.^[49] On September 21, 2016, the court ruled in Ulay's favor, affirming his co-authorship of the disputed works and ordering Abramović to pay €252,000 in unpaid royalties plus €50,000 in legal fees.^[48]^[46]^[51] The ruling underscored the enforceability of written agreements in artistic partnerships, prioritizing contractual obligations over unilateral narrative control of shared creations and revealing underlying commercial frictions in long-term collaborations.^[47]^[48]

Independent Later Works

Evolution to Solo Environmental and Body Art

Following the dissolution of his partnership with Marina Abramović in 1988, Ulay transitioned to independent explorations that intertwined corporeal endurance with ecological concerns, often embedding his body in site-responsive actions to probe human limits against natural and societal forces. In the "Homeless" series of 1992, he positioned his body amid urban marginalization in New York City, photographing himself and others in states of exposure and vulnerability to critique social isolation, yielding Polaroid documentation that emphasized transient human presence over commodified output.^[52]^[3] This marked an extension of pre-collaborative body-testing, now contextualized within decaying public spaces, prioritizing experiential confrontation with environmental and existential precarity. From the 1990s onward, Ulay increasingly addressed ecological themes, particularly water as a motif for scarcity and purity, integrating physical immersion to underscore degradation risks. His "Watertoall" initiative in 2004 advocated for access to clean drinking water through performative and educational interventions, reflecting a causal link between bodily dependence and planetary resource strain.^[53] By 2009, the "Waterfonie" project involved site-specific travels to Patagonia, where he documented water's elemental forms in 36 unique images, using his presence to evoke endurance against natural extremes like glacial flows, thus critiquing anthropocentric exploitation without yielding high-volume market products.^[54] In the 2010s, this evolution culminated in actions like "Water Mark" (2016), a durational pouring of water from an elevated urban vantage in New York—his first such performance there since 1986—symbolizing fluid boundaries between body, environment, and observer while testing physical persistence in controlled exposure.^[55] These works documented relational dynamics between human form and ecological systems, often via video and photo, but consistently favored processual insight into limits over reproducible artifacts, aligning with Ulay's foundational emphasis on unmediated corporeal realism.^[18]^[56]

Photographic and Installational Projects

In the decade following his 1988 separation from Marina Abramović, Ulay returned to solo photography, developing the "polagram" technique—a hybrid of Polaroid instant imaging and traditional photogram processes—to explore the marginalized individual's place in society through abstracted bodily imprints.^[57] This method involved direct contact between the artist's body and light-sensitive materials, producing large-scale, non-representational forms that emphasized transience and self-alteration without narrative embellishment.^[58] By the 2000s, Ulay's projects evolved into participatory installational formats that incorporated audience interaction with photographic media, shifting focus toward communal identity formation while retaining his signature emphasis on the body's mutability. In Ulay Life-Sized (2000), he created life-sized photograms by positioning participants' bodies alongside his own on sensitized paper, capturing ephemeral tensions through controlled light exposures that documented relational dynamics in real time.^[4] Subsequent works like Family at 4 O'Clock (2007) extended this approach, inviting viewers to form group silhouettes at specified intervals, resulting in installations of layered photograms that reflected social aggregation as a counterpoint to individual dissolution.^[4] These explorations culminated in the 2010s with projects addressing aging and corporeal limits, where Ulay employed his deteriorating physical state—marked by lymphatic cancer diagnosed in 2010—as an empirical medium for interrogating identity's fragility. 5 Greek Men (2008) featured sequential photograms of male figures in strained poses, testing muscular endurance against photographic fixation to underscore temporal decay.^[4] In Performing Light (2019), executed amid his illness, Ulay reclined on photosensitive paper in a darkened space while participants extended their arms overhead; a single flash imprinted collective shadows around his silhouette, yielding installations juxtaposed with archival Polaroids to trace lifelong self-transformations from youthful androgyny to frail senescence.^[4] This work empirically probed the aging body's capacity for repetition, with Ulay's repeated exposures revealing causal patterns of fatigue and resilience without reliance on performative endurance beyond documentation.^[4] Throughout these projects, Ulay revisited Polaroid archives for retrospective installations, such as self-portrait series adapted into spatial arrays that visualized identity as a continuum of modifications—piercings, markings, and gender-fluid poses—updated to include later images confronting mortality's imprints.^[59] These contemplative formats prioritized the photograph's evidentiary role over activism, using scale and immersion to foster viewer contemplation of causal bodily evolutions unbound by institutional retrospectives.^[4]

Personal Circumstances and End of Life

Relationships Beyond Abramović

Ulay maintained a long-term residency in Amsterdam following his relocation there in the late 1960s, where he established a base amid involvement with countercultural groups like the Provos, though public details on his familial life remained limited and secondary to his artistic pursuits.^[3] He married briefly at age 21 in the early 1960s, driven by a desire for family stability, but the union dissolved quickly without documented lasting ties.^[60] Prior to his partnership with Abramović, Ulay entered another relationship that culminated in marriage and the birth of a daughter, during which he paused intensive artistic work for approximately four years to prioritize family responsibilities.^[13] Post-1988, after the dissolution of his collaboration with Abramović, Ulay adopted a more solitary lifestyle, with scant public records of romantic involvements until his 2012 marriage to Slovenian graphic designer Lena Pislak; the couple split time between Amsterdam and Ljubljana thereafter.^[12]^[61] No further children are verifiably recorded, and Ulay's personal networks emphasized professional acquaintances over extensive familial or romantic disclosures, aligning with his preference for introspective independence in later decades.^[12]

Health Decline and Death

In 2011, Ulay was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, prompting a period of intensive treatment including chemotherapy administered at the Institute of Oncology in Ljubljana.^[62]^[63] This health challenge was chronicled in the 2013 documentary Project Cancer: Ulay's Journal from November to November, directed by Damjan Kozole, which captured his treatments alongside reflections on his artistic career and farewells to collaborators.^[64]^[65] As his condition progressed, Ulay focused on bodily processes such as hydration, consuming up to four liters of water daily to monitor physiological responses, though he later experienced severe dehydration in 2017.^[9]^[66] In November 2019, amid declining health, he opened the Ulay Foundation Project Space in Ljubljana to preserve his oeuvre, though his worsening state limited his direct involvement.^[11]^[67] Ulay died on March 2, 2020, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, at the age of 76, from complications of lymphatic cancer.^[68]^[15]^[9]

Assessment of Impact

Awards, Exhibitions, and Institutional Recognition

Ulay's institutional recognition emphasized exhibitions over traditional awards, reflecting the experimental nature of his Polaroid and performance works, which garnered attention through major international platforms rather than competitive prizes. In 1982, he participated in Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, presenting works that highlighted his conceptual approach to body and space.^[5] Posthumous acknowledgment intensified following his death in March 2020, with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam organizing "Ulay Was Here" from November 2020 to April 2021—the largest retrospective of his oeuvre to date, encompassing around 200 items including photographs, life-size Polaroids, sculptures, and documentary materials, many exhibited publicly for the first time.^[22] The exhibition underscored his solo contributions in Polaroid photography and body art, organized in consultation with Ulay during his final months.^[69] The Ulay Foundation, founded in 2014 and based in Ljubljana with a project space opened in 2019, has sustained his legacy through archival preservation, museum donations—such as the 2021 gift of the early Soliloquy diptych Polaroids to the Stedelijk—and ongoing exhibitions into 2025, including solo presentations at SPURS Gallery focusing on his early interventions and Auto-Polaroid series, and a Frieze Seoul display exploring his China-related works.^[70]^[71]^[72] Market indicators include auction sales of his Polaroids, with individual pieces realizing prices in the range of €2,000 to €30,000, signaling collector interest in his photographic output despite the niche appeal of his medium.^[73]^[74]

Artistic Influence and Empirical Contributions

Ulay's innovations in Polaroid photography during the 1970s transformed instant film into a performative medium for self-exploration and body documentation, providing artists with a tool for immediate, unmediated capture of transient states. Serving as a consultant to the Polaroid Corporation, he gained unlimited access to film and equipment, enabling series such as "Auto-Polaroid," where he used the camera to record identity shifts and physical alterations in real time, thereby establishing performative photography as a distinct practice.^[4]^[20]^[1] In performance art, Ulay contributed to an empirical approach by systematically testing human physical and psychological boundaries through measurable durations and intensities, prioritizing observable limits over interpretive symbolism. Collaborations like Rest Energy (1980), in which he and Marina Abramović maintained a bow-and-arrow tension aimed at her heart for precisely 4 minutes and 10 seconds amid escalating heart rates, documented quantifiable thresholds of trust, pain, and endurance, offering data on bodily extremes that advanced body art's evidential basis.^[75]^[76] These experiments established a vocabulary of self-imposed duress, influencing the field's shift toward verifiable physiological testing.^[13] Ulay's methodologies causally shaped subsequent endurance practices, notably informing Abramović's solo works that extended joint metrics of sustained physical strain into prolonged immobility and viewer interaction. The Ulay Foundation, founded to safeguard his oeuvre, maintains comprehensive archives of these performances and photographs, preserving raw documentation against the medium's inherent transience and facilitating causal analysis of artistic impacts on human capacity.^[4]^[77]^[11]

Critiques of Performance Art Methodology

Critics of Ulay's performance art methodology argue that his collaborative works with Marina Abramović often emphasized masochistic endurance and physical confrontation as spectacle rather than substantive innovation, with self-inflicted violence serving more to provoke audience discomfort than to yield verifiable insights into corporeal limits.^[78] For example, in "Shoot" (1980), Ulay drew a bow and arrow aimed at Abramović's arm, releasing it to cause controlled injury, a piece labeled masochistic for prioritizing relational pain dynamics over broader empirical advancements in body awareness.^[79] Similarly, "Breathing In/Breathing Out" (1977) involved the artists pressing mouths together, inflating lungs until collapse, critiqued for fetishizing bodily extremes in a manner that borders on sensationalism, desensitizing viewers to nudity and harm without proportional intellectual or societal returns.^[80] Skeptical analyses highlight how such methodologies, rooted in 1970s body art traditions, generated personality cults around the performers while claiming authenticity, yet often lacked causal mechanisms linking physical acts to claimed relational or existential breakthroughs, with ephemeral performances relying on photographic documentation for posterity—a tangible output detractors prioritize over performative claims.^[79] Left-leaning art narratives have overhyped the relational aesthetics in Ulay's oeuvre, such as prolonged staring in "Relation in Time" (1977), as transformative intersubjectivity, but right-leaning perspectives question institutional and taxpayer funding for self-harm exhibitions absent demonstrable utility beyond shock value, noting the irony of commercial success from legally contested archives post-1988 split.^[81] These critiques underscore a broader debate in performance art, where Ulay's boundary-pushing advanced awareness of physical and psychological thresholds empirically, yet risked reducing innovation to masochistic theater, with influence metrics like citations in theory texts defending longevity while verifiable impacts remain contested.^[13]

References

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[40]
Performances by Marina Abramovic and Ulay : Physical interactions ...
May 1, 2024 · Marina Abramovic and Ulay see themselves as two interacting systems, but only through their two bodies in motion.
[41]
Ulay and Marina Abramović turned love into a performance - Vox
Feb 11, 2022 · Their first performance, “Relation in Space,” consisted of the two artists running and hitting each other with their naked bodies for an hour.Missing: controversies nude
[42]
Marina Abramović. The Great Wall Walk. 1988/2008 - MoMA
Originally performed for 90 days along The Great Wall of China. 16mm film (color, silent) transferred to two-channel video. 16:45 min. © 2010 MarinaMissing: endpoints | Show results with:endpoints
[43]
Marina Abramović walks China's Great Wall only to break up
Marina Abramovic & Ulay – The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk (still), 1988/2008, performed for 90 days along The Great Wall of China. 16mm film transferred to ...Missing: endpoints | Show results with:endpoints
[44]
Revisiting Marina Abramović's 'The Great Wall Walk' - CNN
Oct 9, 2024 · In 1988, Marina Abramović and Ulay embarked on a 90-day performance that saw them walk towards each another from opposite ends of the Great Wall ...Missing: endpoints | Show results with:endpoints
[45]
'It was painful, it was hardship': Marina Abramovic on her ill-fated ...
Sep 17, 2019 · In April 1988, Abramovic and fellow artist Ulay started from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China—the eastern Gulf of Bohai on the Yellow ...Missing: endpoints | Show results with:endpoints<|separator|>
[46]
Marina Abramović ex-partner Ulay claims victory in case about joint ...
Sep 21, 2016 · Ulay launched a lawsuit last year in which he claimed that Abramović has violated a contract they signed in 1999 covering works they had created ...Missing: agreement division
[47]
Ulay vs. Marina Abramović: How the epic legal battle between art ...
Sep 25, 2016 · According to the 1999 contract, Abramović had to pay Ulay 20 percent of the total net income (defined as the gross income of Abramović after ...Missing: division | Show results with:division
[48]
Ulay Wins Case Against Former Collaborator Marina Abramović
Sep 22, 2016 · A Dutch court ordered Abramović to pay Ulay over €250000, where the latter accused the former of violating contract over joint works.Missing: division | Show results with:division
[49]
Marina Abramović sued by former lover and collaborator Ulay
Nov 11, 2015 · ... Abramović has violated a contract they signed in 1999 covering works they had created together. Ulay claims that Abramović has asked ...Missing: agreement division
[50]
Marina Abramović's Former Partner Sues Seeking Credit for Joint ...
Nov 11, 2015 · According to the Guardian, Ulay alleges that Abramović kept the royalties for works that they created when they were together. He claims ...
[51]
Court Orders Marina Abramović to Pay Ulay and Give Him Credit for ...
Sep 22, 2016 · The document stipulates that their works must be jointly credited, but Ulay claimed that Abramović had not given him his due on many of them.Missing: division | Show results with:division
[52]
Radical performance artist Ulay gets a solo show at Stedelijk Museum
Dec 26, 2019 · The museum owns at least 20 works by Ulay, a body art pioneer, including the two photography series known as Homeless (1992) and Rest Energy ...Missing: 1990s 2000s
[53]
Ulay | Artists | SPURS Gallery
Through his “Auto-Polaroid” series, he explored themes of identity, gender, and the transformative potential of the body, often using his own image as the ...Missing: sence | Show results with:sence
[54]
Ulay: Pioneer of Performance Art - DailyArt Magazine
Mar 12, 2020 · Here, in Amsterdam, he started performing in the early 1970s, often without an audience and only with a Polaroid camera as a witness. In ...Attracted By Anarchism · A Twisted Mind · Ulay In His Last Decade
[55]
ULAY - Water Mark — mitra khorasheh | curator
Water Mark was an exclusive performance by ULAY on May 7th, curated by Mitra Khorasheh. ULAY'S last performance project in New York was in 1986.
[56]
Marina Abramović's former partner Ulay returns to the stage
May 6, 2016 · On Friday night, Ulay will perform at Kustera Projects Red Hook for a Frieze art fair piece entitled Water Mark. A collaborative artwork with ...
[57]
Sophie Thun, Ulay, the uncontrolled aspect of rushing into position ...
In the 1990s, after the break with Abramović, Ulay experimented with a new technique he called “polagram”, a combination of a Polaroid and the classic photogram ...
[58]
Ulay - New Exhibitions
In the 1990s, Ulay returned predominantly to photography, critically evaluating the position of the marginalised individual in contemporary society and the ...
[59]
ULAY | 11 January - 23 February 2019 | Richard Saltoun
Feb 23, 2019 · One of Ulay's most important performative actions Irritation – There is a Criminal Touch to Art (1976) is featured in the exhibition through ...Missing: portraits | Show results with:portraits<|separator|>
[60]
Ulay Who? | Versopolis Review
Apr 9, 2018 · A horrifying sound that reminded Ulay of his childhood back in Solingen, Germany: He was born in a bomb shelter in 1943, when World War Two ...
[61]
Ulay | The Herald
Mar 19, 2020 · Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen), who has died aged 76, was a German artist who was best-known for his Polaroid photography which explored the concept of gender.<|separator|>
[62]
Ulay's latest body art: beating cancer | Comment - Screen Daily
Jul 29, 2014 · The resulting feature documentary, Project Cancer, shows Ulay battling cancer as well as doing a “farewell journey” around the globe to see friends.<|separator|>
[63]
Project Cancer Damjan Kozole - Vertigo
The first scenes were shot in November 2011 at the Ljubljana Institute of Oncology, where Ulay was receiving chemotherapy. When his health slightly improved ...Missing: treatment | Show results with:treatment
[64]
Project Cancer: Ulay's Journal from November to ... - Film International
Sep 22, 2014 · An intimate journal framed by Ulay's treatment, a career retrospective, interviews, and a tour to say farewell to old friends.Missing: stress | Show results with:stress
[65]
Watch Project Cancer | Prime Video - Amazon.com
30-day returnsUlay's illness informs Project Cancer, which is part-retrospective, part-visual document of the year he believed could be the last of his extraordinary life.Missing: treatment | Show results with:treatment
[66]
5 things you didn't know about provocative performance artist Ulay
Mar 2, 2020 · Performance artist Ulay has died in Ljubljana, Slovenia, at the age of 76, after a long period of suffering from cancer.Missing: Dvanadvis | Show results with:Dvanadvis
[67]
Ulay Foundation Project Space - Culture of Slovenia
Feb 2, 2021 · ... actions" being the theft, from a Berlin museum, of one of Hitler's favourite paintings, which he then hung in the apartment of an immigrant ...
[68]
'A pioneer and provocateur': performance artist Ulay dies aged 76
Mar 2, 2020 · The performance artist Ulay has died in Ljubljana, Slovenia, aged 76. He had been suffering from lymphatic cancer.
[69]
Ulay, on His Own Terms - The New York Times
Dec 30, 2020 · Ulay, who was a conceptual photographer and a performance artist before and after his work with Ms. Abramovic, had a powerful oeuvre of his own.
[70]
ULAY Foundation donates two early, pivotal Polaroids of Ulay
May 18, 2021 · The ULAY Foundation and its cofounder, Ulay's wife Lena Pislak, generously donated the Soliloquy diptych to the Stedelijk Museum.Missing: awards honors
[71]
SPURS Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of Ulay @ulay ...
Aug 15, 2025 · This presentation focuses on the early period of his career, bringing together his radical art interventions, Auto-Polaroid series, and Relation ...
[72]
Beyond the Great Wall - Frieze
Aug 25, 2025 · A solo presentation at Frieze Seoul explores how a complex relationship with China shaped Ulay's art.
[73]
Marina Abramovic & Ulay * - Photography 2024/10/16 - Realized price
Oct 16, 2024 · Marina Abramovic & Ulay * - Photography 2024/10/16 - Realized price: EUR 2,080 - Dorotheum.
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marina abramovic (b. 1946) & ulay (1943-2020)
Free deliveryPrice Realised EUR 30,240 ; Estimate. EUR 30,000 - EUR 50,000 ; Closed · 23 Apr 2024 ; Details. MARINA ABRAMOVIC (B. 1946) & ULAY (1943-2020) Marina in Yellow (from ...
[75]
Marina Abramović and Ulay. Rest Energy. 1980 - MoMA
As our performance is progressing heart beats become more and more intense and it's just four minutes and ten seconds, for me it was, I tell you it was forever.Missing: details | Show results with:details
[76]
Marina Abramović's Rest Energy – What you should know
She credits this four minutes long performance piece as being her most difficult work.Missing: details | Show results with:details
[77]
About — Ulay Foundation
Established in the Netherlands in 2014 by the artist himself, ULAY Foundation is dedicated to preserving and promoting the historically unique oeuvre and ...Missing: 2019 | Show results with:2019
[78]
[PDF] Early Relation Work of Marina Abramovic and Ulay
Before meeting, both artists explored intensely dangerous situations. These performances happened in the early 1970's when Fluxus and the Happenings were.
[79]
AGAINST PERFORMANCE ART - Artforum
The genre of “performance art” has always been compromised from within, producing spectacle and personality cult even as it generates authenticity and ...Missing: methodology | Show results with:methodology
[80]
Marina and Ulay - Flash Art
Dec 13, 2016 · I didn't want to exist with such traumas. My art was a kind of freeing. MA: Yes, Ulay's works were more depressive in a psychological way but ...
[81]
Biopolitical Masochism in Marina Abramović's The Artist Is Present
The essay seeks answers to questions of political import that many critical analyses of Abramović's performance, which focus on details of the performer's ...