20 September 2018

Ulay visiting the Museo Novecento

The artist and former companion of Marina Abramovic, in Florence for the The Cleaner exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, visited the exhibition of Piero Manzoni, founder of Performing Art, at the Museo Novecento.

A special guided tour. This morning the first visitor to cross the threshold of the Museo Novecento in Florence was Ulay, a German artist and former companion of Marina Abramovic, in the city for the anthological exhibition dedicated to the Serbian performer which opens to the public tomorrow at Palazzo Strozzi. The curators of the Museum accompanied Ulay along the renewed path of the Museum culminating the visit to the “Magic Base” by Piero Manzoni, work at the center of the monographic project “Solo. Piero Manzoni” curated by Gaspare Luigi Marcone (inaugurated on Tuesday 18 September), which displays a selection of the “objects” produced by the artist between 1959 and 1962.

Ulay, famous for the provocative and daring performances staged together with Abramovic in the seventies and eighties, thus became the protagonist of a new performative act, that of climbing on the “Magic Base” – a pedestal climbing on which, in the intentions of Manzoni, one of the founders of Performing Art, anyone should feel and be considered a work of art – effectively transforming himself into a living work of art.