Ulay, performance artist best known for his work with Marina Abramovic – obituary

Ulay, who has died aged 76, was best known for his 12-year collaboration with the performance artist Marina Abramovic; meeting in Amsterdam in 1975, the two artists became lovers, their avant-garde work based on that relationship. While performances sometimes strayed into parody, the themes of love and aggression struck a chord with the art-going public and critics alike.

At the Venice Biennale in 1976 they premiered Relationship in Space, which featured the pair naked, running into each other with increasing speed. Other works involved forcing gallery visitors to pass through an uncomfortably narrow entranceway in which the pair, nude, stood facing each other; or most dangerously, the couple, again naked, counterbalancing each other on opposite sides of a drawn bow and arrow, the arrow pointed at Marina Abramovic’s heart. A slip of Ulay’s finger and Abramovic would have been killed.

Ulay was born Frank Uwe Laysiepen in the western German steel town of Solingen during an air raid on November 30 1943. His father, Wilhelm, had run a company producing razor blades but Ulay was conceived on his return from fighting at Stalingrad.

A broken man, he died when the child was 14, causing Ulay’s mother Hildegarde to withdraw from society and live in a forest. An orphan in all but name, Ulay looked after himself, continuing his education at the gymnasium in Altenkirchen.

He studied industrial photography, and married in 1964, establishing a printing lab two years later. Aged 25 he received his national service papers and, recalling his father’s war experiences, left his wife and three-year-old son for Amsterdam.

There he joined the Provo movement, an anti-war, environmentalist group; the young artist took part in street battles with police and joined sit-ins blocking cars from the city centre.

He photographed these demonstrations using a Polaroid camera and by night immersed himself in Amsterdam’s counterculture, snapping the city’s drag queens and transvestites in the bars along Rembrandt Square. In 1968, while he was commuting to Cologne to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, Polaroid commissioned him as a consultant. In 1970 he produced a book, 5 Cities, for them, photographing in Amsterdam, London, Rome, Paris and New York.

In the US he encountered a barefoot Bianca Perez-Mora Macias, and the Nicaraguan model, who later married Mick Jagger, briefly became his muse.

Back in Europe Ulay staged his most bizarre work yet, a meticulously planned raid on Berlin’s New National Gallery, stealing The Poor Poet, a romantic painting by Carl Spitzweg said to be Hitler’s favourite artwork. The audacious act, photographed and filmed by accomplices, earned him 36 days in prison, but the artist skipped the country before sentencing (he returned the painting unharmed, having hung it in a Turkish immigrant family’s lounge overnight).

In 1975 he was tasked with picking up a young Serbian performance artist from Schipol airport for a performance at an Amsterdam gallery: Ulay says he fell in love with Marina Abramovic instantly. The couple would tour their collaborative works throughout Europe in a battered Citroën van.

In 1977 they exhibited at Documenta in Kassel and the Paris Biennale. A naked performance in Italy was closed down by the police under obscenity laws, yet Ulay refused to put on clothes until they received their fee.

“We lived as gypsies, without a permanent place of residence,” he recalled. “We complemented each other, we were neither male nor female, but saw our unity as a kind of hermaphrodite being. It was a real symbiotic relationship.”

It was a tempestuous one, too, with Ulay’s eye for other women causing arguments. In 1988 the pair planned to marry in a grandiose fashion that would double as performance. Each would walk 2,500 km from either end of the Great Wall of China, exchanging vows in the middle. With their relationship shaky however, The Lovers became a document of their break-up. “We had accomplished a monumental work – separately” Marina Abramovic later claimed.

While she became an art-world celebrity, Ulay’s later career was quieter. During the 1990s he made a series of participatory works critical of the EU, including Fortress Europe, Kill Your Pillow, in which the artist mimicked the hostile borders of the EU to non-Europeans through a series of empty bottles snaking across the gallery.

In 1998 he had a show of Polaroids at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, where a new retrospective opens this year. A 2017 exhibition at the Cooper Gallery, Dundee, was followed by shows at the MOT International and Richard Saltoun galleries in London

The artist’s relationship with his erstwhile lover remained strained until a reconciliation in 2017. In 2010 he surprised Marina Abramovic during The Artist Is Present at the MoMA in New York, a much-hyped work involving members of the public sitting opposite her in silent contemplation. In 2015 Ulay sued his former partner claiming she had violated a contract regarding their shared work. He was awarded €250,000.

He is survived by his wife Lena Pislak, who he married in 2009, and three children.

Ulay, born November 30 1943, died March 2 2020