The Boris Lurie Art Foundation and David David Gallery are pleased to announce that a major exhibition of the work of Boris Lurie will take place at David David Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, from November 16 to December 12, 2012, with an opening reception on Friday, November 16, from 5pm to 8pm. Born in Leningrad in 1924, Boris Lurie suffered the great upheavals of the Twentieth Century at first hand. His grandmother, mother, and sister were executed by the Nazis in the 1941 massacre at Rumbula, near Riga, and he and his father were interned at, and survived, a series of concentration camps, including Stutthof and Buchenwald. His coming of age in the depths of hell profoundly affected both his view of the world and the direction his art would take, and set him immediately apart from the artists among whom he found himself on his arrival in America after the war. As Sarah Schmerler remarked in her catalogue essay for Lurie’s 1998 gallery show, Bleed, 1969, “Most American artists of the Forties were fresh out of art school. Lurie was fresh out of Buchenwald.” There are deeply humane and inherently European aspects of his work, not to mention aggressively political dimensions, which rendered Lurie an alien presence in the New York art world of the forties through the seventies (and beyond). His animus against Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dada, and Pop Art, with all of which movements aspects of his own work share certain visual and tactical qualities, is essentially a resistance against the widespread (and typically American) desire to leave the war behind and to forget its ravages in the midst of the wealth and optimism that victory and consequent economic ascendancy had engendered. Lurie was by no means stuck in the past, but having lived it, he refused to behave as if it had never happened, or that other horrors were not ever-present or constantly threatening. Lurie and his NO!art cohorts were among the precursors of the gradually expanding protest movement against the Vietnam War; they were among the first to thematize the threat of Nuclear Destruction in art; and they were certainly among the earliest Americans to decry the ascent of and the dehumanization caused by consumer culture, whose anti-human fallacies, like the Situationists in France, they exposed in their art. The great art critic Harold Rosenberg’s characterization of their work as “Pop, with venom added” doesn’t quite capture the depth or the seriousness of their mission.
