The body as a battlefield, as an instrument of truth, and as a space of resistance: this is the core of the exhibition that SPURS Gallery dedicates to Ulay, a pivotal figure of late 20th-century Performance Art. Born in wartime Germany and self-exiled in the 1970s, Ulay (1943 - 2020) transformed his biographical instability into a radical practice, choosing the body as his ultimate medium to confront themes of identity, power, and belonging. Renowned for his collaborations with Marina Abramović, the artist is presented here through more than twenty works, ranging from early performative photography to some of his most iconic actions. Among them stands out Irritation - There Is a Criminal Touch to Art (1976), a disruptive gesture in which he stole a painting from the Neue Nationalgalerie and placed it in the home of a Turkish immigrant family, turning a bourgeois icon into a political provocation. Other works, such as Nightsea Crossing Conjunction (1983), reveal his use of time and endurance as instruments of extreme presence. The exhibition restores Ulay in his full complexity: an artist who embraced turbulence as a condition of authenticity, dissolving the boundaries between art and life and offering the public a lesson that remains strikingly urgent.
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