Boris Lurie and Wolf Vostell: Art After the Shoah

This exhibition compares for the first time in Hungary the artists Boris Lurie and Wolf Vostell under the umbrella of their common engagement with the Shoah.

Boris Lurie, born in 1924 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and Wolf Vostell, born in 1932 in Leverkusen, were particularly close, both artistically and emotionally, under the sign of their common effort to come to terms with human violence and with the genocide of the European Jews carried out by the Nazis—the Shoah, of which most of the female members of Lurie’s family were victims as well.

Lurie, the Russian Jew who grew up in Riga and experienced the horrors of the Shoah, was immediately understood by Vostell, who as a German wanted to empathize with these traumatic experiences.

The two artists met for the first time on the occasion of Vostell’s happening YOU in April 1964 on Long Island. Vostell wrote about this encounter in 1977 in retrospect: “At the very same time I made the acquaintance of Boris Lurie [...]. It had been all too natural that this meeting materialised—we had been working on the same theme and in the same mode of expression. But Boris’ conscience and own empirical experience dominate his creative personality: he does not merely observe, but he accuses with his visual works. Hitler’s destruction works.“

At the center of the artistic work of Boris Lurie and Wolf Vostell was their engagement with the reality of the mass media, which can distort all critical content and relativize it. Both artists sought to appropriate visual techniques from the mass media in order to go against the grain and thus counteract the mechanisms of permanent manipulation used by mass media. The hypocrisy of the puritanical American public, which used sex for commercial promotion, was a theme in countless works by Lurie.

The lived experience of the crimes and the violence of the perpetrators left a permanent trauma with Lurie. The guilt of the survivors collided with the experience of the unbearable indifference of his contemporaries about the suffering of the survivors. With his NO! art Lurie was responding to the cynicism of the American “affluent society,” for whom all needs, such as love and human closeness, and all images, independently of their moral significance, have become commodities. Like Vostell, he rejected the circulation of art as a commodity on the art market.

Both artists adopted the techniques of collage and assemblage in the late 1950s as they were found in the thriving Pop Art scene in New York and among the artists of Nouveau réalisme in Paris. They evolved their own artistic language from them.

Both artists sought to appropriate visual techniques from advertising that Pop Art had adopted affirmatively to go against the grain and thus counteract their mechanisms of permanent manipulation.

Boris Lurie and Wolf Vostell employed shocking, profoundly disturbing visual materials and in doing so were trying to soften the senses of their audience, which they thought had been blunted by the flood of stimuli from the media. They chose an art that broke up reality and put it together again in surprisingly new ways, which confronted viewers with the facts and phenomena of violence, which they left behind without explaining or creating meaning, thus pushing them to adopt their own position.

They shared the strategy of activating senses with visual shocks. Every one of their images is a personal statement against violence, against visual manipulation, against sexism. Vostell wanted his visual work to make life more worthy of art—and for Lurie, his art had become a means of survival.

Concept of the exhibition and catalogue by Eckhart J. Gillen and Daniel Koep. 

Curator: Prof. Dr. Beate Reifenscheid   
Assistant Curator: Jan Elantkowski
Consultant: Rafael Vostell  

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Boris Lurie Foundation, the Wolf Vostell Estate, and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag.

Press contact: Gabriella Rothman, rothman.gabriella@ludwigmuseum.hu