In “Light/Dark,” they slapped each other repeatedly, and in “Breathing In/Breathing Out,” they blocked their nostrils with cigarette filters, then locked mouths, sharing each other’s breath until they passed out.

In “Nightsea Crossing,” the couple sat at a table for seven hours at a stretch, not moving and barely blinking. That work had come about after the couple had spent a year living together in the Australian Outback, Ms. Abramovic told The New York Times in 1986. It was an attempt to bring the spiritual contemplation possible in the desert into a city, she said.

In Ulay’s final work with Ms. Abramovic, “The Lovers,” each of them walked more than 1,000 miles from different ends of the Great Wall of China until they met. The work had been conceived to culminate in the couple’s marriage, but by then they were estranged, and it was used to mark their separation instead.

They did not speak to each other again for some 20 years.

Frank Uwe Laysiepen was born on Nov. 30, 1943, in Solingen, Germany. He trained as a photographer and worked as a consultant for Polaroid. He used Polaroid photography early in his art career, experimenting with depictions of his identity, sometimes by cross-dressing.

Renown came after he had met Ms. Abramovic while living in Amsterdam in 1975. They immediately considered themselves soul mates, even discovering that they shared the same birthday, Ms. Abramovic wrote in “Walk Through Walls” (2016), her autobiography.