Fifty years ago, on 12 December 1976, Ulay “stole” Carl Spitzweg’s The Poor Poet (1839) from the Neue Nationalgalerie and brought it by car to the home of a so-called guest worker family in Kreuzberg. Half a century later, the Neue Nationalgalerie revisits this radical intervention with the exhibition Ulay, Ulay & Abramović, bringing Ulay’s work back into the museum where one of his most important actions took place.
Ulay is regarded as one of the most important German conceptual artists, yet remains largely unknown to a wider audience in Germany. 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. 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.