Fifty years ago, on December 12th, 1976, Ulay “stole” Carl Spitzweg’s The Poor Poet (1839) from the Neue Nationalgalerie and brought it by car to the home of a migrant family in Kreuzberg. Half a century later, the Neue Nationalgalerie revisits this seminal intervention with the exhibition Ulay, Ulay & Abramović, bringing Ulay’s work back into the museum where one of his most important actions took place.
Image gallery
Ulay, Irritation – There is a Criminal Touch to Art, 1976, film stills, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Ulay / Marina Abramović, Imponderabilia, Performance, 1977, 90", Galleria Communale d’Arte Moderna, Bologna
Marina Abramović / Ulay, The Lovers, Performance, March-June, 1988, 90 days, The Great Wall of China
Ulay is regarded as one of the most important German conceptual artists, yet remains largely unknown to a wider audience in Germany.
Ulay: Identity, Photography and Transformation
The exhibition offers an insight into Ulay’s early artistic work, including S’he (1973–1974), a series of intimate self-portraits exploring identity and transformation, and FOTOTOT (1976), in which unfixed photographs gradually disappear when exposed to light. The work forms part of a broader body of experiments that challenge the presumed objectivity, permanence, and evidentiary status of the photographic image, ultimately opening photography toward performance and other forms of artistic action.
Twelve Years of Ulay and Marina Abramović
In addition, the exhibition presents the unique and uncompromising collaboration between Ulay and Marina Abramović over a period of twelve years, from 1976 to 1988.
The second part of the exhibition focuses on the renowned partnership between Ulay and Marina Abramović. In 1975, they met in Amsterdam and soon formed a close personal and artistic partnership.
Between 1976 and 1988, the two artists collaborated on groundbreaking performances in which they used their bodies as a medium to explore questions of identity and institutional boundaries. Their collaboration began with Relation in Space (1976), performed at the 38th Venice Biennale, where they explored physical encounter, repetition, and mutual presence, and culminated in The Lovers (1988), their 90-day journey along the Great Wall of China. Integrating artistic practice into everyday life, they challenged conventional notions of authorship, identity, and artistic production. Their work explored vulnerability, endurance, trust, and interdependence and is considered a milestone in performance art.
The exhibition brings together videos, photographs, sculptures and drawings, as well as sketches and letters, alongside a live performance of Imponderabilia (1977), a seminal performance by Ulay and Marina Abramović in which the artists stood naked facing each other in a narrow entrance, inviting visitors to pass between their bodies. The performance will be presented daily from 3 to 4.30 pm.
Together, these works offer insight not only into the performances themselves but also into the processes, discussions, and reflections behind them. They reveal how Ulay and Abramović redefined artistic collaboration and self-representation while challenging established boundaries between authorship, individuality, and the relationship between art and life.
Ulay: Fotografie and Performance
Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen, 1943–2020) grew up in Solingen and trained as a mechanical engineer before studying photography at the Kölner Werkschulen. In 1968, he moved to Amsterdam, where he began working with Polaroid and developed an artistic practice exploring identity, gender, and transformation.
His performative photography soon gained recognition in Amsterdam’s innovative and international art scene, with early presentations at Galerie Seriaal and the equally legendary and influential institution De Appel. From 1976 to 1988, his collaboration with Marina Abramović brought both artists international recognition, including appearances at documenta 6, 7, and 8 and exhibitions across Europe and the United States. Ulay continued his independent practice after their separation in 1988, and his work was later presented in major solo exhibitions and retrospectives, including the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2016 and in 2020–21 the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam with ULAY WAS HERE, the largest retrospective of his work to date.
From 1998 to 2004, he was Professor of Media Art at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. In the following decades, he pursued participatory art projects with socially marginalized communities around the world, including in the USA, Australia, India, Myanmar, and Syria. Ulay died in Ljubljana in 2020.
Marina Abramović: Pioneer of performance art
Marina Abramović (1946, Belgrade) has pioneered performance as a visual art form, since the early 1970s. She created some of the most important early works in this practice, including Rhythm 0 (1974) and Rhythm 5 (1974). These performances tested the limits of body and mind, exploring endurance, vulnerability, and the audience's complicity through time, stillness, and pain. In 2012, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art and long durational work, built around the ‘Abramović Method’. Abramović was one of the first performance artists to be formally accepted by the museum world, with major solo shows across Europe and the US over more than 25 years. Highlights include her first major US retrospective and the 700-plus-hour performance The Artist Is Present at MoMA, New York (2010), the retrospective The Cleaner (2017–19), and the first solo show by a woman in the Main Galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2023). Her honours include the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1997), the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts (2021), the Sonning Prize (2023), and the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture (2025).
The exhibition takes place in the lower gallery of the Mies van der Rohe building, beginning with two rooms dedicated to Ulay’s independent practice before moving on to the works created jointly by Ulay and Marina Abramović. By presenting their shared legacy alongside Ulay’s own artistic practice, the exhibition highlights the significance of Ulay’s work within the history of conceptual and performance art, while bringing renewed attention to his importance in Germany and internationally.
- Ulay, Ulay & Abramović is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, director of Neue Nationalgalerie, with Ricarda Bergmann, Neue Nationalgalerie, as well as Alenka Gregorič, artistic director of Cukrarna Gallery. Curatorial assistance: Nikola Richolt.
