Boris Lurie: Life with the Dead

Presented by Boris Lurie Art Foundation and Center for Persecuted Arts.

With the exhibition Life with the Dead​, we commemorate Boris Lurie’s 100th birthday with a view to introducing a wider public to the significant work of this artist. The exhibition is located at monumental Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice, with the Spazio Badoer adjoining the church of San Giovanni, and it is a perfect venue for this show. The space had once been used as a burial site, with the word Coemeterium (place of interment) written above the door. It is a site of eternity and resurrection.

Boris Lurie was born in Leningrad in 1924 and raised in Riga. On December 8, 1941, he lost his mother, grandmother, sister, and his first love to a mass shooting by the Nazis in the Rumbula forest near Riga. These dead people accompanied him throughout every moment of his life. Boris Lurie survived the terror of the concentration camps, and bore witness to the horrors of the Holocaust in many respects. Co-founder of the NO!art movement, he created diverse, provocative, and occasionally extreme collages, drawings, sculptures, and texts. His works are not just expressions of suffering, however. They are symbols of hope, by one of the few survivors since 1945, of achieving wholeness. “There is no greater pain than to feel as a stranger among people,” wrote Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Notes from the Underground, and it is this pain that Boris Lurie screams out, as a universal human experience in all of his works. On display in the Spazio Badoer of the Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista, are more than fifty works ranging from the years 1950 to 1970. These include his most significant collages, the Immigrant’s NO!box, and the Shit Sculptures, to name only a few.

Boris Lurie holds up a mirror to society and therefore to us. He shows the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust. But he also shows how a society threatens to forget the crime against humanity through superficial consumption, seduction through pornography and the perversion of power.

With this exhibition, we bring to the public artistic work that could hardly be more topical in these times of growing antisemitism, racism, and right-wing populism worldwide.

The Center for Persecuted Arts in Solingen is a museum of discovery, dedicated exclusively to artists whose works and opportunities for development were blocked, prevented, or destroyed by the dictatorships of the last century and by totalitarian regimes up to the present day. It is an interdisciplinary museum, and its collection of visual art and literature tells of lost and neglected works of art, stories, and fates.

The Boris Lurie Art Foundation in New York is dedicated to reflect the life, work and aspirations of Boris Lurie and to preserve and promote the NO!art movement with its focus on the social visionary in art and culture.

The Foundation maintains the artist’s massive body of work, poetry, personal writings and archives, as well as the works of other NO!art artists which are under its control, making them available to the public and institutions of learning throughout the world.

In the spirit of Mr. Lurie’s bequest, the foundation supports a variety of initiatives, including exhibitions, publications, films, acquisition,and internships. Through this range of activity the Boris Lurie Foundation believes it will make a material contribution to the  artistic, social and educational life of the community.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog in three languages published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, with contributions by René Block, Achille Bonito Oliva, Saul Ostrow, Gertrude Stein, Rafael Vostell, Jürgen Kaumkötter, Jürgen Wilhelm and Tom Wolfe.

Press contacts
Kathrin Luz, Kathrin Luz Communication. kl [​at​] luz-communication.de
Rafael Vostell, representative of the Boris Lurie Art Foundation in Europe, info [​at​] vostell.de