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TAGGED: ►Art after Shoah/Budapest + Year of Caring + Appearances + Museo Mexico City + Immigrants + Lurie's Lyrics + Concert about Lurie + Munich Theater + Performances Munich + Deals with the past + Art after Shoah + Otto Nagel + Photobook week + Kunsthaus Dahlem + Violence and Consumption + Art Fair Positions + Shock Therapists + Lurie at Positions + Vietnam War + Auschwitz spotlights + Angry Reappraisal03.04.2023 | #097:47 | Boris Lurie & Wolf Vostell at Ludwig Museum Budapest/Hungary | Art after the Shoah |A German artist Wolf Vostell, a pioneer of video art, happenings and the Fluxus movement, and the Leningrad-born artist and Holocaust survivor Boris Lurie, founder of the New York NO!art movement, were linked by a 30-year friendship beginning in 1964. Under the title "Art after the Shoah," the works of these two artists are now on view together, a show that reveals their artistic and spiritual closeness. After the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Kunsthaus Dahlem and the Ludwig Museum Koblenz, the exhibition is now on view at the Ludwig Museum Budapest.
Wolf Vostell, B52 Lippenstiftbomber, 1968
VG BILD KUNSTDepicting the unimaginable, negotiating the horror of the Shoah in artistic practice - Boris Lurie and Wolf Vostell have tried to do this throughout their lives, always putting their finger in the wound. And this in the post-war period, when talking about the war and coming to terms with the Holocaust were taboo - this is shown in the exhibition "Art after the Shoah" at the Ludwig Museum Budapest.
In this confrontation with the Shoah, the two artists found a common ground, a common language, explains Beate Reifenscheid, director of the Ludwig Museum Koblenz and curator of the show. Like activists, they carried the mantra of "not forgetting" in front of them, wanting to take action against society simply overlooking what happened.
Wolf VostellTrauma as a driving force for art: For the German Wolf Vostell, this was a question of attitude and a general desire to position himself politically with his work. For Boris Lurie, it was his personal traumatic experiences that he tried to process in his art - while he and his father survived four concentration camps, several women from his family were murdered in a brutal massacre. In addition to their frustration at the failure to come to terms with this period, both artists were also disturbed by the rising consumerism of the postwar era; the role of the media also prompted them to take a critical look.
In addition to these shared views, there were - even before their meeting - parallels in the artistic practice of Boris Lurie and Wolf Vostell, as the research for the exhibition has shown. According to Beate Reifenscheid, it became increasingly clear that the two had been friends for a very long time, had done one thing or another together and, above all, had influenced each other very strongly. Very many works show a great intellectual or conceptual proximity to each other.
Boris LurieDisturbing images with impact: for inspired by stays in Paris in the early 1950s, the two artists - independently of each other - agreed on collage. Images from advertising, words from newspapers, and, as in the case of Boris Lurie, pornographic depictions of women, were combined with photos of victims of the Holocaust in their collages. Similar to Jackson Pollock, Boris Lurie formulated these collages like an "all over, where you don't even see the individual structures anymore," explains Beate Reifenscheid.
One would be overwhelmed by individual images, by fragments. And that's what Wolf Vostell does later, too - create a fragmentary structure "that eats you up as a viewer," the curator continues. This clash of extreme opposites, of strong images, is also what makes the work of the two thoroughly disturbing.
Today's validity: Art that still stirs things up today - entirely in the spirit of its creators. The parallels to the present cannot be dismissed out of hand, says Beate Reifenscheid. After all, we have many trouble spots, populism, and a high level of consumerism. "We see many people as objects and not as subjects," says the curator. That's why she finds such exhibitions particularly important; you can learn a lot from them.
"Art after the Shoah" can now be seen at the Ludwig Museum Budapest, after stops at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Kunsthaus Dahlem and the Ludwig Museum Koblenz, until July 30, 2023.
03.02.2023 | #09:20 | Jahr im Zeichen der Fürsorge - Budapester Zeitung | Schrecken des Holocaust | Die konfrontative Kunst von Boris Lurie und Wolf Vostell wird zum ersten Mal in Ungarn zu sehen sein: Die Ausstellung „Kunst nach der Schoah“ wird am 31. März eröffnet. Sie stellt die Schrecken des Holocaust und die Traumata seiner Opfer der Oberflächlichkeit der Konsumgesellschaft gegenüber.
2/3/2023 | #09:20 | Year of Caring - Budapest Gazette | Horrors of the Holocaust | The confrontational art of Boris Lurie and Wolf Vostell will be on display in Hungary for the first time: The exhibition "Art after the Shoah" will open on March 31. It juxtaposes the horrors of the Holocaust and the traumas of its victims with the superficiality of consumer society
12/27/2022 # 09:31 | Bans on appearances by the "religious-national bloc" | Tachles | Exchange of fire in the West Bank. | 12/26/2022 # 00.00 Museum exhibition for Boris Lurie. | Texan desecrates Chanuukia. | Podcasts | Over 300 American rabbis want to keep members of the new Netanyahu government out of their synagogues and congregations. An open letter is circulating at American synagogues calling for blockades of religious nationalist exponents of the new Netanyahu government from Jewish communities in the United States. As reported by JTA, the appeal was initiated by David Teutsch, a rabbi with the "Reconstructionists" in Philadelphia, and Rabbi John Rosove, who has led Temple Israel in Los Angeles. A copy of the letter could not be found online. But the letter reportedly has already found more than 330 signers. These all work at Conservative, Reform or other, liberal synagogues. They do not want Israeli politicians such as Itamar Ben-Gvir to appear at their temples and community institutions, but also want to promote further support for this request. As justification, the letter cites five goals of the Religious Nationals that would "do irreparable damage to the Jewish Diaspora's relationship with Israel." These include excluding non-Orthodox Jews from Israeli citizenship, undermining LGBTQ rights, annexing the occupied West Bank, or expelling Arab citizens for political opposition. The letter speaks to widespread unease among mostly liberal Jewish Americans. However, figures like Ben-Gvir or the openly homophobic Avi Maoz are unlikely to be interested in appearing at Reform synagogues.
12/26/2022 #01:31 | Museum exhibition for Boris Lurie | Tachles | The "Museo Nacional de las Culturas del Mundo" in Mexico City, dedicated to world cultures, shows 95 works of the Holocaust survivor from Riga. "No Complaciente" is the title of the exhibition "Boris Lurie - No Complaciente" with 95 works of the artist, who died in New York in 2008, which will be on display at the "Museo Nacional de las Culturas del Mundo" in the Mexican capital until May 21, 2023 (link). In collaboration with the New York-based "Boris Lurie Art Foundation," the house dedicated to world cultures will show 95 works by the artist. Lurie had traveled to Mexico for several weeks in the late 1990s to get to know the country and culture better. The exhibition is also a retrospective of his time in Mexico and his first exhibition there, and is attracting a lot of attention, not least from Jewish media there (link). Lurie was born in Leningrad in 1924, but grew up in Riga. He was 16 years old at the time of the German invasion. The Germans murdered most of his family and Lurie's first girlfriend. Only he and his father survived and were able to emigrate to the United States in 1946. But he had already begun to process his experiences of suffering artistically at the end of the war. Even though he was soon to expand the media and formal language of his work, the linking of his own life with consumer culture and thus the transformation of people, bodies and art into commodities and consumer goods remained Lurie's central project as an artist. --- Andreas Mink
12/26/2022 #01:31 | 70,000 immigrants in 2022 | Tachles | "Keine Kompromisse" is the German translation of the title of the exhibition "Boris Lurie - No Compromises" with 95 works by ... | Around 70,000 new immigrants from 95 countries will have immigrated to Israel in the expiring year 2022. In addition to the Jewish Agency, the Israeli Aliyah and Integration Ministries have helped to realize this best result in the last 23 years. The comparison to 2021 can even be described as "dramatic," as only just 266,00 nine-immigrants immigrated to the Jewish State in 2021. Most immigrants in the year came from Russia and Ukraine, while aliyah from most other states returned to pre-pandemic levels. The Jerusalem Post, in its report on the subject, notes in particular the unprecedented commitment of relevant organizations and communities worldwide in the face of the situation in Ukraine: "In cooperation with the Israeli government and Jewish communities around the world, led by the Jewish Federation of North America and Keren Hajessod, a wide variety of operations were launched in countries bordering Ukraine within 24 hours of the start of the Russian invasion. - Data for the period between January 1 and December 1 of the current year show that 37,564 olim from Russia and 14680 from Ukraine arrived in Israel during the reporting period. In addition, there were 3500 new immigrants from North America, 2094 from France, 1993 from Belarus, 1498 from Ethiopia, 985 from Argentina, 526 from Great Britain, 426 from South Africa and 336 from Brazil. The breakdown of olim by age group is also interesting: Some 27 percent of this year's immigrants are young people aged 18-35, including professionals in fields where there are shortages in Israel such as medicine, engineering and education. Some 24 percent of the olim are children and teenagers up to 17 years old, 22 percent of the immigrants are people between 36 and 50 years old, 14 percent are people between 51 and 65 years old, while 13 percent are over 65 years old. --- JU Jacques Ungar
12/19/2022 #13:19 | Munich theater: "Lurie's Lyrics" and "News from the Past" - Culture - SZ.de | sueddeutsche.de | The Kammerspiele presents a concert about NO!art founder Boris Lurie and a theater play by Ukrainian Stas Zhyrkov. | Theater of Memory: Why does the horror repeat itself?
"News from the Past," a Ukrainian-German play development with Edmund Telgenkämper, Vitalina Bibliv, Leoni Schulz and Dmytro Oliynyk (from left).
(Photo: Judith Buss)The Munich Kammerspiele is showing a concert about the artist Boris Lurie, who survived four years in German concentration camps. Plus a Ukrainian play about famine and the rise of Hitler. By Egbert Tholl ►more
12/19/2022 #13:19 | Theater - Ilja Richter: Erspare mir im Internet sehr viel Ärger - Kultur - SZ.de | Süddeutsche Zeitung | The Münchner Kammerspiele is showing a concert about the artist Boris Lurie, who survived four years in German concentration camps. In addition, a Ukrainian play ... |Ilja Richter: Saves me a lot of trouble on the Internet. Berlin (dpa) - Author, actor and presenter Ilja Richter keeps his hands off social media platforms. "I don't exchange ideas on the Internet with people who either like me or don't like me," Richter told Deutsche Presse-Agentur in Berlin ahead of his 70th birthday this Thursday (Nov. 24). "Before I know it, I may have to deal with shitstorms there." Richter sees good reasons for his abstinence. "It saves me a lot of trouble, maybe I'll miss out on some fun, that may be. But I have so much fun doing so many things that I don't want to test that out." Although Richter regularly posts a column online, he says he doesn't monitor social media. "I take note of what people tell me."
Richter, who presented the music show "Disco" from 1971 to 1982, can't imagine the then very young presenter on social media either. "The young Ilja Richter was, after all, even more old-fashioned than he is now."
His conservative image at the time also resulted from his outfit. In the hippie-influenced '70s, Richter presented his music show in a suit, shirt and tie. "The suit was my battle dress," Richter now judged. "I suffered from the fact that many leftists thought I was right-wing because I wore a suit."
11/17/2022 #13.22 | Munic theater presents "Lurie's Lyrics" | Tachles | ... the multi-media performance "Lurie's Lyrics," which brings to life texts by the great nonconformist and Holocaust survivor Boris Lurie.
11/14/2022 #01:15 | Munich: Lurie's Lyrics and News from the Past at the Kammerspiele - Süddeutsche Zeitung | How does one deal with the past and memory? For seven weeks, the Kammerspiele will be addressing this question. This week, two more productions will be added. By Yvonne Poppek | The difficult view back.
They approach the artist Boris Lurie in an "experimental stage production": Jost Hecker, Zoro Babel, Julia Wahren and Leo Gmelch (from left.9 (Photo: Judith Buss)
Sometimes you have to look closer to discover the big picture. For example, this one in the Kammerspiele's October schedule: Looking back, first director Anna Smolar explored with her actors how personal trauma is passed on to the next generations in "Hungry Ghosts." The next day, Chilean company "La Resentida" tackled the violent repression of the 2019 protests in their homeland. This was followed by the wonderful production "Les statues rêvent aussi", which dealt with colonial looted art. In between, evenings on the theme of National Socialism.
The arc? It's a whole series of productions, readings or talks that the Kammerspiele has been bringing together since October 22 under "Remembrance as Work on the Present." The seven-week project links past and present. One of the guiding questions is formulated by dramaturge Martin Valdés-Stauber as follows: "What can different artistic strategies contribute to memory work?" This week, two more artistic approaches are now being added to answer this question.
11/11/2022 #22:56 | "Art After the Shoah": Ludwig Museum shows horrors of the Holocaust in paintings by Boris Lurie and Wolf Vostell | Rhein-Zeitung | Here, Soviet-born Boris Lurie (1924-2008), who survived the Holocaust in various concentration camps while the Nazis ... | "Art After the Shoah" | In times of increasing historical forgetfulness, in which Corona opponents march unquestioningly alongside right-wing radicals, the constant remembrance of the Holocaust seems - unfortunately - more necessary than ever. Koblenz's Ludwig Museum is now tackling this task in its new exhibition "Art After the Shoah." For the visitor, this is no light fare over long stretches - and yet absolutely worth seeing. ►more
10/29/2022 #04:20 | Otto Nagel: Close to the People and the Avant-Garde (nd-aktuell.de) | ND | Only recently, the exhibition curated by Gillen with works by Wolf Vostell and Boris Lurie was on view in Berlin-Dahlem and will soon be ... | by Matthias Reichelt | A small but fine exhibition of oil paintings and pastel chalk drawings by the Berlin artist and communist Otto Nagel (1894 - 1967) is currently on display in the attic of the Museum Eberswalde. It is compiled from the archive holdings of the Berlin Academy of Arts. For conservation reasons, Nagel's works are only exposed to dim light. Among them, for example, is the wonderful scene with the old buildings of Berlin's Fischerinsel, still undestroyed and nested, shortly before their demolition. Nagel unabashedly called his pastel drawing in 1965 "Abschied vom Fischerkiez IV" ("Farewell to the Fishermen's Neighborhood IV").
He was not only a chronicler of a proletarian Berlin, but also of urban architecture and a critic of the demolition of historic ensembles. Architecturally important testimonies all too often, in the GDR as well as in the FRG, fell victim to an unconditional modernization mania.
Even if the exhibition cannot surprise with completely unknown images, the accompanying catalog, edited by the productive and busy art historian and curator Eckhart Gillen, holds new insights into Nagel's life. Just recently, the exhibition curated by Gillen with works by Wolf Vostell and Boris Lurie was shown in Berlin-Dahlem and will soon be shown in Koblenz. Otto Nagel, born in Berlin Wedding as the fifth child of a working-class family, developed a talent for drawing at an early age, began an apprenticeship as a mosaic and glass painter, but then worked as a painter, among other things. In 1912 he joined the SPD, refused military service at the front and was interned in Cologne for it. As a member of the Soldiers' Council, he returned to Berlin, where he first joined the USPD and eventually the KPD.
10/26/2022 #12:15 | "Photobook Week Aarhus 2022" with diverse program | Tachles | Art from New York with works by three co-founders: Boris Lurie, Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher. The movement was founded in the 1960s ...
10/24/2022 #23:13 | boris lurie | Current Update | News | berlin daily (until 30.10.22) | art in berlin | Wolf Vostell in dialogue with Boris Lurie, Kunsthaus Dahlem. Event in the context of the exhibition ART AFTER THE SHOAH Wolf Vostell in the ...
9/22/2022 #10:23 | boris lurie | Current Update | News | Art in Berlin: Contributions to the Current Art Scene - Tagesspiegel | Violence and Consumption: A Berlin Exhibition Shows the Angry Reappraisal of the Shoah by Artist Friends Wolf Vostell and Boris Lurie...
9/17/2022 #02.23 | boris lurie | Current Update | News | Berlin Art Week and more (Part 4) art in berlin | More on this exciting artist is currently available in the exhibition Art after the Shoah. Wolf Vostell in Dialogue with Boris Lurie at Kunsthaus Dahlem ...
Room view: Boris Lurie Art Foundation / POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair, photo kuagThe other special exhibition is dedicated to the work of the US artist Boris Lurie (1924 - 2008), the co-founder of the New York NOart! movement. Lurie, influenced by his experiences in a concentration camp, wanted to undermine aesthetic standards and counter the pleasing consumerism of art.
This exhibition is produced in cooperation and with the support of the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, Clifton, New Jersey. More on this exciting artist is currently available in the exhibition Art after the Shoah. Wolf Vostell in Dialogue with Boris Lurie at Kunsthaus Dahlem. We have reported on the exhibition in detail here.
9/13/2022 #23:49 | boris lurie | Current update | News | Art fair "Positions" at Tempelhof Airport: Highlights of art - der Freitag | Especially the show with works of the US-American NO!art artist Boris Lurie, who died in 2008, stands out - but also the ... | For sale. Berlin Art Week Bauhaus, NO!art, crypto art: At the "Positions Berlin Art Fair" in Tempelhof there is an interesting offer. Now it begins, the Berlin Art Autumn. It is ushered in not least by the ninth edition of the "Positions Berlin Art Fair" as a partner of the Berlin Art Week. In Hangar 5 - 6 of Tempelhof Airport: 88 galleries from 20 countries with contemporary and modern art. In addition, a supporting program with special exhibitions, award ceremonies and talks.
Especially the show with works of the US-American NO!art artist Boris Lurie, who died in 2008, stands out - but also the special presentation "NFT Positions" in cooperation with the Frankfurt gallery Greulich could be interesting against the background of an increasingly difficult market situation for crypto art, which was much hyped only a few months ago. The "Trash Talk" on Saturday, September 17, at 5 p.m. could also be whimsical, with fair directors Heinrich Carstens and Kristian Jarmuschek talking about "everything but the art market."
9/2/2022 #10:14 | boris lurie | Current Update | News | Boris Lurie and Wolf Vostell: Shock Therapists in Arno Breker's Studio | fr.de | At the Kunsthaus Berlin-Dahlem, two friends influenced by the Holocaust meet posthumously: Wolf Vostell and Boris Lurie. | By: Ingeborg Ruthe |
"NO!art," box of a Holocaust survivor. © Boris Lurie
Two friends influenced by the Holocaust meet posthumously at the Kunsthaus Berlin-Dahlem: Wolf Vostell and Boris Lurie.
Berlin-Dahlem, Käuzchensteig 8, a popular art house since 2015. Friday afternoon it is unusually quiet in the high halls. Outside the sun is heating up, inside in the cool the visitors lower their voices. Even the children only whisper. As if what hangs on the walls, stands on pedestals or in showcases has taken away their voices.
Is it permissible to use the term genius loci? Spirit of the place? The noble term burns on the tip of the tongue. For the exhibition building was once the state studio of the Nazi sculptor Arno Breker. But 77 years after the end of the ill-fated Thousand-Year Reich, artists have thoroughly denazified this place. Instead, they have filled it with the spirit of peace, humanism, democracy, and artistic freedom.
One of the most consistent tenants was Wolf Vostell (1932-1998), a Berliner by choice from Leverkusen. A political Fluxus pioneer, forerunner of happenings and media art, he was drawn to the Frontstadt. To this "tragic climatic health resort Berlin," as he called Berlin. This place, "which contains our history. And I process this history in my pictures and in my objects.
Here he expressed his criticism of consumer society in the post-war economic miracle West with downright rabid anti-monuments. For example, two Cadillac cars cast in concrete at the end of the Kudamm. But also in many happening actions, in which his spiritual affinity to Joseph Beuys became clear. He sank television sets of West German affluent citizens into concrete, named an entire series of works around 1980 "Endogenous Depression," in which he presented the "favorite objects" of consumer society" that had been set in concrete: TV, automobile, airplane, musical device. These were overly clear statements against mass medialization and against the manipulation as well as suggestion of consumptive needs. It is clear that certain circles called him a spoilsport and would have preferred to chase him away to the society of scarcity in the East.
And he was a painter who, even in the year before his death, smashed the monumental painting "Shoah" with acrylic paints and concrete slush onto the three wooden panels of the huge triptych. He had moved into the formerly "contaminated" Dahlem workspace in 1984. At that time, he had long since built his first environment, the spatial artwork "Black Room. The Holocaust was his major theme. This was one of the reasons why he dressed like an old Jewish scholar in his more mature years - today one would probably accuse him of cultural appropriation. But Wolf Vostell was not religious. He regarded art as his religion.
What ignorant people thought was exalted was his concern. Like the German society reunited in 1990 with all its mechanisms of repression. To remind us of what must never be forgotten. That Vostell is one of the most important German artists of the 20th century was immediately understood by the East German public at the exhibition "Deutschlandbilder" in 1997. There we saw the decollages from the "Black Room" such as "German Outlook," "Treblinka" and "Auschwitz Headlight 568."
Now we are standing in front of it again in the Kunsthaus Dahlem. Vostell would be 90 years old in October. Reason for the director Dorothea Schöne as well as the guest curator and Vostell connoisseur Eckhart Gillen to unpack all that has driven this intense artist to the phenomenology of the repressed until the end. Even when he was commuting with his Spanish wife Mercedes between Malpartida de Cáceres in the surreal landscape of Extremadura and Berlin. Seven meters wide is the painting "Shoah 1492-1945". It is dedicated to the Jews once expelled from Spain and other countries, as well as those murdered by the Nazi regime.
A concrete pillar, the upper part of which is reminiscent of the torn open jaws of a beast, collapses onto an abstract tangle of bodies. A second pillar sinks into the hopelessly destroyed mass of bodies. It is no coincidence that the painter based the force and brutality on Picasso's anti-war painting "Guernica". For him, the slain people and the Auschwitz spotlight placed directly opposite in the exhibition were "The same in green", witnesses of a perfidious power system, whose "womb is still fertile, from which this crawled ...", as Brecht warned.
Vostell met the Jewish painter Boris Lurie (1924-2008), who grew up in Riga, in the 1960s. It was a brother in spirit, who had to endure the horrors of the Shoah and the Holocaust on his own body. His family was murdered. Only he and his father survived the Nazi Buchenwald satellite camp in Magdeburg. Lurie emigrated to New York and founded "NO!art" there in 1959. This is a gruff, gripping visual language, often with direct reference to the Shoah and the superficial, unobjectionable consumer culture of the postwar period. The two were in intense contact. Lurie did not seek sympathy for the victims of the Shoah. His art relied on a kind of shock therapy. With documentary photos of the gas chambers, naked piles of corpses in the death camps, yellow Stars of David, swastikas, Nazi bean bags and provocative pin-up girls as products of the same inhumane system. As painting on a transport crate, on escape trunks and canvases.
Curator Eckhart Gillen intertwines Lurie's art with Vostell's crude pictorial works, but again to achieve our fright that both wanted. In Lurie's 1964 collage-like painting "A Jew Is Dead," the merciless immediacy of the mixture of symbols, writing and body parts triggers the shock. And then there's this dark room, in front of which hangs the sign "Enter at your own risk." Vostell's "Thermo-Electronic Chewing Gum" is an installation where chewing and smacking sounds are transmitted through a micro-sensor taped to the cheek into the speaker of a suitcase. Barbed wire left and right, and you step on thousands of spoons and forks. Concentration camp "flair" meets fruit gum indulgence. Camp hell and everyday banality. History, but also the present - in the horrific refugee camps of this world, in Putin's war against Ukraine.
Vostell and Lurie - the artist's delight were attacked in their time by lovers of lucious, pleasing art, because they tore many viewers from their comfortable complacency. Because they annoyed with their "ugly pictures". Both were accepted, understood, revered or else rejected. Now we understand that their art has lost nothing of its explosive power.
Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin, Käuzchensteig 8: until Oct. 30, catalog 20 euros.
8/27/2022 #01:21 | boris lurie | Current Update | News | Special Exhibition BORIS LURIE at POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair | art in berlin | The exhibition is curated by Rafael Vostell, Senior Advisor of the Boris Lurie Art Foundation and Heinrich Carstens, Director of Position Berlin. | Tempelhof Airport Hangar 5-6. | September 15 - 18, 2022. Opening Reception Thursday September 15, 2022 #18 - 9 pm. | In the supporting program of the POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair: Talk about Boris Lurie and NO!art. Friday, September 16, 2022, 4 pm. - Dr. Beate Reifenscheid (Director Ludwig Museu Koblenz) and Dr. Thomas Heyden (Curator Neues Museum Nürnberg. Presentation: Rafael Vostell (Senior Advisor to the Boris Lurie Art Foundation). The New York-based Boris Lurie Art Foundation is pleased to be present at Positions Berlin for the first time at a German art fair and to present selected works from the early 1960s by Boris Lurie (1924, Leningrad - 2008, New York) to a broad audience. The exhibition is curated by Rafael Vostell, Senior Advisor of the Boris Lurie Art Foundation and Heinrich Carstens, Director of Positions Berlin.
Responsive image BORIS LURIE „No Posters Mounted“ 1963.
Offset print on wastepaper mounted on canvas. 221 x 172 cm. BLAF.000063Boris Lurie (1924-2008) Boris Lurie was born in 1924 in Leningrad (now St.Petersburg) as the youngest child of Shaina and Ilya Lurye. His mother was a popular dentist, his father a successful businessman. As a result of the confiscation of his business sanctioned by Stalin, Ilya Lurie fled to Riga. A year after the birth of Boris Lurie, the family moved to Riga. Boris Lurie attended the German grammar school in Riga. In 1941, during the German invasion of Riga, on two days, November 30 and December 8, 1941, a total of over 25,000 Jews were murdered by the German and their Latvian collaborators in the Rumbula massacre (a forest near Riga). Among them were Boris Lurie's grandmother, his mother, his sister Josephina and his childhood sweetheart Lyuba Treskunova. Boris and his father were deported first to the Riga ghetto and later to several labor and concentration camps. Both father and son survived the Shoah and were liberated by the U.S. Army on April 18, 1945, at the Magdeburg-Polte concentration camp. A year later, Boris Lurie and his father Ilya emigrated to New York.
Once in New York, Boris Lurie is confronted with an ignorant American consumer society that does not want to know about the war and the Shoah. It is only very many years later that the coming to terms with this terrible and inconceivable genocide begins. American magazines such as LIFE magazine publish photos of the gas chambers and other horrible crimes of the Nazis and print these photos in their magazines right next to advertisements for lipsticks, detergents and other things. This direct juxtaposition of the inconceivable crimes of the Nazis in connection with consumer goods prompted Boris Lurie to critically reappraise them in his paintings and collages. Lurie worked on his complex works and writings until his death in 2008.
virtualgallery.borislurieart.org
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8/16/2022 #01:21 | boris lurie | Current Update | News | Kunsthaus Dahlem: Shoah, Pin-ups and Vietnam War (nd-aktuell.de) | ND | Wolf Vostell worked in Berlin, Boris Lurie in New York City. An exhibition at Berlin's Kunsthaus Dahlem brings together the works of the two | Wolf Vostell worked in Berlin, Boris Lurie in New York City. An exhibition at Berlin's Kunsthaus Dahlem brings together the works of the two artists, who are friends. Review by Matthias Reichelt.
Exhibition view at Kunsthaus Dahlem, Wolf Vostell's triptych "Shoah 1492-1945" on the right side of the picture (1997) Photo: VG Bild-Kunst/Gunter LepkowskiThe large and tall studio building in Berlin-Dahlem for the sculptor Arno Breker, one of the most prominent "god-blessed artists" in Nazi Germany, was built on the initiative of Albert Speer from 1939 to 1942. It was intended to be used for the production of large sculptures for the megalomaniac transformation of the Reich capital "Germania", but due to the war it was hardly used. The building survived the war without major damage and since 2015 has housed in one part the Kunsthaus Dahlem, an exhibition venue under the direction of art historian Dorothea Schöne.
What happened in the meantime? It was precisely there that Wolf Vostell, born Wolfgang Schäfer in Leverkusen in 1932, had his studio, along with others - from 1984 until his death in 1998. Vostell was one of the few artists who, in opposition to the social atmosphere characterized by the economic miracle, affirmation of capitalism, the Cold War, and anti-communism, disturbed the whitewashing, concealment, and forgetting of Nazi crimes that went with it. As early as 1967, two years after the end of the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt am Main, Vostell took up the theme in a drastic way with the color serigraph "Treblinka". The motif shows naked Jewish women, shortly before they are shot in a hollow. With a pink line running along above the women's heads, Vostell marked not only his, but also the viewer's desired focus. With "Treblinka," Vostell presumably deliberately wanted to point to a site of mass extermination that was not so well known at the time. However, the depiction is based on a photograph taken by the German policeman Gustav Hille in the Ukraine. He had become an eyewitness to the mass execution in October 1942 after the ghetto in Misoch in the western Ukrainian oblast of Rivne was dissolved. Vostell's silkscreen is included in the current exhibition at Kunsthaus Dahlem entitled "Art after the Shoah. Wolf Vostell in Dialogue with Boris Lurie".
There is also exhibited, in addition to embedded televisions that express Vostell's criticism of the mass medium, the photo assemblage "Combs" (Combs) from 1968. For it, the artist used the famous photograph of a German policeman pointing his rifle at the back of a mother carrying her child in her arms in Ivanogorod, Ukraine, in 1942. Along the horizon line, Vostell applied ridges, thus also marking the line of fire from the perpetrator to the victims.
Boris Lurie, who met Vostell in 1964 at his Fluxus happening in Great Neck, New York, kept up a lively correspondence with the Berlin artist until his death. While Vostell's over six-meter-long painting triptych "Shoah" from 1997 and a large, walk-in environment staged as a concentration camp room are shown alongside other works, Lurie's art is much less present. His work is housed like an appendix in a back room. This makes the dialogue announced in the exhibition title more difficult.
Lurie, who was born in 1924 into a Jewish bourgeois family in Leningrad, grew up in Riga because his father, a businessman, was prevented from working in the Soviet Union. He moved his business to Riga and the family followed. Under the German occupation, Lurie's mother, grandmother and one sister, as well as his first childhood sweetheart Lyuba Treskunova, were shot in the fall of 1941 with the help of Latvian policemen on German orders, along with some 28,000 other women, children and the elderly. Lurie's other sister survived, as she was in Italy and emigrated to the USA. Boris Lurie and his father Ilya survived several camps as forced laborers and were liberated in April 1945 in Polte-Werke, Magdeburg, a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp. They emigrated to New York City in 1946 and Lurie began his artistic career there, but sold little and kept his head above water with advertising work.
Initially, he addressed the horrors he had experienced in figurative paintings. After only a short time, he turned to a "freer" form of art, but continued to treat his memories in increasingly drastic ways, placing them in a larger political context. He developed an entire series of Dismembered Women in the 1950s, which on the one hand clearly related to the loss he experienced, and on the other alluded to the capitalist marketization of the female body. Lurie successively combined painting with the technique of collage. He associated pin-ups with Nazi atrocities, but also recalled U.S. imperialist crimes, for example in Vietnam. With Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, Lurie took over the March Gallery, a project space in the basement of a building on the Lower East Side that had previously been run by Elaine de Kooning and others. There they gathered other artists around them under the name NO!art.
In addition to the thematic parallels between Vostell and Lurie - both recall the Shoah in their work and also criticized the Vietnam War - they were also united by their rejection of the art market, in which what was pleasing and accepted was necessarily successful and overly critical positions were ignored. Vostell expressed such criticism in interviews and texts; Lurie, together with Sam Goodman, created sculptures in the form and color of human excrement as the ultimate expression of their disdain for the art business. In their 1964 "NO-Sculpture Show," they even gave these sculptures names of collectors and gallery owners such as "Shit of Castelli" (after Leo Castelli) and "Shit of Sonnabend" (after Ileana Sonnabend).
Thanks to an inherited fortune after his father's death in 1964 and his own stock market speculation, Lurie was able to maintain a completely independent position vis-à-vis the art establishment and paid for it with a low profile. Thus, a two-part exhibition of Lurie and the NO!art artists of the NGBK in Berlin in 1995 was, with a few exceptions, largely ignored by the press. Lurie's aesthetic had much to do with punk and brought together many phenomena of mass media presence with traces of painting in an exuberant manner on large tableaus. In some works, however, Lurie used a strong reduction reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp's Ready Mades. Under a newspaper image of a pile of corpses from Buchenwald concentration camp on a truck, he laconically added the title, technique, year, and author: "Flatcar, Assemblage, 1945 by Adolf Hitler."
"Art after the Shoah. Wolf Vostell in Dialogue with Boris Lurie," through October 30, Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin.
8/8/2022 #23:09 | boris lurie | Current Update | News | Art after the Shoah: Auschwitz spotlights and swastikas with pin-up girls - Berliner Zeitung | Two friends influenced by the Holocaust meet posthumously at Kunsthaus Dahlem: Wolf Vostell and Boris Lurie. In front of their works, one is almost stunned by the ... | Art after the Shoah: Auschwitz headlights and swastikas with pin-up girls. At Kunsthaus Dahlem, two friends influenced by the Holocaust meet posthumously: Wolf Vostell and Boris Lurie. Their works almost take your breath away. Review by Ingeborg Ruthe.
Detail of Wolf Vostell's seven meter wide painting "Shoah 1942-1945", painted in 1997 in the Berlin studio at Käuzchensteig 8 - today Kunsthaus Dahlem - which was rented by the Berlin Senate at the time. VG Bildkunst Bonn 2022/The Wolf Vostell EstateKäuzchensteig 8, Dahlem, a popular art house since 2015. Friday afternoon it is unusually quiet in the high halls. Outside the sun is heating up, inside in the cool the visitors lower their voices. Even the children only whisper. As if what hangs on the walls, stands on pedestals or in showcases has taken away their voices.
Is it permissible to use the term genius loci? Spirit of the place? The noble term burns on the tip of the tongue. For the exhibition building was once the state studio of the Nazi sculptor Arno Breker. But 77 years after the end of the ill-fated Thousand-Year Reich, artists have thoroughly denazified this place. Instead, they have filled it with the spirit of peace, humanism, democracy, and artistic freedom.
One of the most consistent tenants was Wolf Vostell (1932-1998), a Berliner by choice from Leverkusen. A political Fluxus pioneer, forerunner of happenings and media art, he was drawn to the Frontstadt. To this "tragic climatic health resort Berlin," as he called Berlin. This place, "which contains our history. And I process this history in my pictures and in my objects.
Boris Lurie: "NO!art", the box of a Holocaust survivor, emigrant in New York and Vostell's friend Boris LurieHere he expressed his criticism of consumer society in the post-war economic miracle West with downright rabid anti-monuments. For example, two Cadillac cars cast in concrete at the end of the Kudamm. But also in many happening actions, in which his spiritual affinity to Joseph Beuys became clear. He sank television sets of West German affluent citizens into concrete, named an entire series of works around 1980 "Endogenous Depression", in which he presented the "favorite objects" of consumer society" that had been set in concrete: TV, automobile, airplane, musical device. These were overly clear statements against mass medialization and against the manipulation as well as suggestion of consumptive needs. It is clear that certain circles called him a spoilsport and would have preferred to chase him away to the lack society of the East.
They were friends for life and are now united posthumously in this Dahlem show: Boris Lurie (left) and Wolf Vostell, visiting him in New York, 1960s. Kunsthaus DahlemAnd he was a painter who, even in the year before his death, smashed the monumental painting "Shoah" with acrylic paints and concrete slush onto the three wooden panels of the huge triptych. He had moved into the formerly "contaminated" Dahlem workspace in 1984. At that time, he had long since built his first environment, the spatial art work "Black Room. The Holocaust was his major theme. This was one of the reasons why he dressed like an old Jewish scholar in his more mature years - today one would probably accuse him of cultural appropriation. But Wolf Vostell was not religious. He regarded art as his religion. What ignorant people considered exalted was his concern. Like the German society reunited in 1990 with all its mechanisms of repression. To remind us of what must never be forgotten. That Vostell is one of the most important German artists of the 20th century was immediately understood by the East German public at the exhibition "Deutschlandbilder" in 1997. There we saw the decollages from the "Black Room" such as "German Outlook," "Treblinka" and "Auschwitz Headlight 568."
Now we are standing in front of it again in the Kunsthaus Dahlem. Vostell would be 90 years old in October. Reason for the director Dorothea Schöne as well as the guest curator and Vostell connoisseur Eckhart Gillen to unpack all that has driven this intense artist to the phenomenology of the repressed until the end. Even when he was commuting with his Spanish wife Mercedes between Malpartida de Cáceres in the surreal landscape of Extremdura and Berlin. Seven meters wide is the painting "Shoah 1492-1945". It is dedicated to the Jews once expelled from Spain and other countries, as well as those murdered by the Nazi regime.
Boris Lurie "A Jew is Dead," 1964. What remains, says the painted suitcase.
Boris Lurie Art FoundationA concrete pillar, the upper part of which is reminiscent of the torn open jaws of a beast, collapses onto an abstract tangle of bodies. A second pillar sinks into the hopelessly destroyed body mass. It is no coincidence that the painter based the force and brutality on Picasso's anti-war painting "Guernica". For him, the slain people and the Auschwitz spotlight placed directly opposite in the exhibition were "The same in green," witnesses to a perfidious system of power whose "womb is still fertile from which this crawled ... as Brecht warned.
Vostell met the Jewish painter Boris Lurie (1924-2008), who grew up in Riga, in the 1960s. He was a brother in spirit who had to endure the horrors of the Shoah and the Holocaust in his own body. His family was murdered. Only he and his father survived the Nazi Buchenwald satellite camp in Magdeburg. Lurie emigrated to New York and founded "NO!art" there in 1959. This is a gruff, gripping visual language, often with direct reference to the Shoah and the superficial, unobjectionable consumer culture of the postwar period. The two were in intense contact. Lurie did not seek sympathy for the victims of the Shoah. His art deliberately relied on a kind of shock therapy. With documentary photos of the gas chambers, naked piles of corpses in the death camps, yellow Stars of David, swastikas, Nazi bean bags, and provocative pin-up girls as products of the same inhumane system. As painting on a transport box, on escape trunks and canvases.
Wolf Vostell: "Endogenous Depression" (Los Angeles version), 1980,
Cement on television set on doctor's cabinet.
VG BIldkunst Bonn 2022/ THE WOLF VOSTELL ESTATECurator Eckhart Gillen intertwines Lurie's art with Vostell's crude pictorial works, but again to achieve our fright, which both wanted. In Lurie's 1964 collage-like painting "A Jew is Dead," the merciless immediacy of the mixture of symbols, writing and tortured body parts triggers the shock. And then there's this dark room, in front of which hangs the sign "Enter at your own risk." Vostell's "Thermo-Electronic Chewing Gum" is an installation where chewing and smacking sounds are transmitted through a micro-sensor taped to the cheek into the speaker of a suitcase. Barbed wire left and right, and you step on thousands of spoons and forks. Concentration camp "flair" meets fruit gum indulgence. Camp hell and everyday banality. History, but also the present - in the horrible refugee camps of this world, in Putin's war against Ukraine. Vostell and Lurie - both artists' delights were attacked in their time by lovers of epicurean, pleasing art, because they tore many viewers out of their comfortable complacency. Because they annoyed with their "ugly pictures" on still everyday violence and contempt for humanity. Both were accepted, understood, revered or else rejected. Now we understand that their art has lost nothing of its explosive power.
Kunsthaus Dahlem, Käuzchensteig 8, until Oct. 30, Wed-Mur 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Catalog 20 Euro
7/26/2022 #23:26 | boris lurie | Current Update | News | Wolf Vostell and Boris Lurie at Kunsthaus Dahlem: Enter at Your Own Risk | Tagesspiegel | Violence and Consumption: A Berlin Exhibition Shows the Angry Reappraisal of the Shoah by Artist Friends Wolf Vostell and Boris Lurie. |
Boris Lurie: A Jew is DeadWolf Vostell and Boris Lurie at Kunsthaus Dahlem: Enter at your own risk. Violence and Consumption: A sBerlin exhibition shows the angry reappraisal of the Shoah by artist friends Wolf Vostell and Boris Lurie. ezension by Gunda Bartels: Metallic crunching, piquant rustling? How to describe the glaring sounds that arise when one walks through Wolf Vostell's installation "Thermo-Electronic Chewing Gum." Not to mention the chewing gum, the smacking sounds of which are transmitted to the loudspeaker of a suitcase to be taken along by means of a micro-sensor stuck to the cheek.
The room is gloomy, outside hangs a sign "Enter at your own risk." Barbed wire fences to the left and right evoke concentration camp associations. The creepy feeling of walking on 13,000 spoons and forks is countered by the "Juici Fruit" rubber, which functions as a symbol of an all-trivializing capitalist way of life. Yes, it is analogies of the seventies that the artist works with here. Nevertheless, the installation has lost absolutely nothing of its brazen force. On the contrary: the images of violence and death seem tragically topical, even if the war in Ukraine provides others every day.
Shock therapy, but artistic
It is an artistic shock therapy that the Kunsthaus Dahlem prescribes to visitors in the exhibition "Art after the Shoah. Wolf Vostell in Dialogue with Boris Luri"", prescribes to the visitors, who are also warned at the entrance against "disturbing images". Namely, shots of half-starved concentration camp prisoners and corpses, which the artist friends Vostell and Lurie repeatedly weave into their furious reappraisal of the Holocaust.
Wolf Vostell, born in 1932 and co-founder of the Fluxus movement, is one of the most important German artists of the 20th century. Boris Lurie was born in Leningrad in 1924, grew up in Riga, and as a Jew experienced the Nazi machinery of extermination firsthand.
The women in his family were murdered, his father and he were deported to a concentration camp and liberated in 1945. Lurie emigrated to New York, where he founded the NO!art movement in 1959 and lived as an artist and author until his death in 2008.
Against the established art business, against the complacency of consumer society, and above all: against oblivion. With these thrusts, Lurie and Vostell are brothers in spirit. Throughout his life, Vostell acted as a thorn in the flesh of the Federal Republic with his sculptures, object boxes, paintings, collages, and happenings. Legendary is the storm of indignation that arose in Berlin in 1987 against his Cadillacs set in concrete on Rathenauplatz.
When Vostell and Lurie met at a happening in 1964, there was an immediate spark. And a fruitful artistic exchange, also documented in 94 letters, began. This is told by Dorothea Schöne, the director of the Kunsthaus Dahlem. Schöne also initiated the exhibition as a tribute in the run-up to the 90th birthday of Vostell, who died in 1998, which will be celebrated in October.
Combs of Death. Wolf Vostell's silkscreen "Combs" from 1968. Photo: Boris Lurie Art <QA0><EL-1>Foundation, VG Bild-Kunst, <EL-1>Bonn 2022 © Boris Lurie Art Foundation, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022The fact that swastikas and Jewish stars, which Boris Lurie aggressively stages in his collages and objects, are emblazoned here, of all places, in the former studio building of the Nazi sculptor Arno Breker as a kind of anti-propaganda of the destructive Nazi ideology, adds a double bottom to the impressive show.
The fact that the city of Berlin gave Wolf Vostell the high hall, now used as a café, as a studio for life in 1984 is like a kind of exorcism. The range of his sculptural works and paintings, which can be seen at the former place of their creation, has the same effect.
Concrete pillar collapses onto a tangle of bodies
The seven-meter-long triptych "Shoah 1492 - 1945," dedicated at the same time to the Jews once expelled from Spain and to those murdered by the Nazi regime, is the central eye-catcher. Vostell, who also lived in Spain, in Malpartida de Cáceres, has a concrete pillar collapse onto an abstract tangle of bodies in the 1997 painting. Despite the force of symbolism, colors and forms, the work is quite clearly reminiscent of Picasso. Vostell's objects, in which the pioneer of video art also incorporated televisions, look much more independent.
[Kunsthaus Dahlem, Käuzchensteig 12, through Oct. 30, Wed-Mur 11 a.m.-5 p.m.]
The limited half-life of the technology, however, proves to be a conservation challenge, as Dorothea Schöne says. The object boxes with the mini-televisions, which originally linked current news with images of the New Reich Chancellery or a bombed-out city as a continuum of human violence, have lost a dimension because the things no longer run. The pictures "Stalingrad" and "May 8, 1945," which work with overpaintings of newspaper clippings, prove to be more timeless.
In contrast to his colleague Vostell, Boris Lurie does not work with abstractions, but rather combines photographs of pin-up girls from the sixties with concentration camp images in his collages. In both photographs, which degrade people to objects, inhuman systems manifest themselves according to his conviction. That they are not history but persist is a conviction he shares with Wolf Vostell.
Nur dass sich der Jude Lurie mit dem heißen Herzen des Betroffenen über die Banalisierung der Shoah empört. Inklusive des beißenden Witzes, der ihn „From a happening, 1945 – by Adolf Hitler“ unter das Bild eines halb nackten, klapperdürren KZ-Häftlings schreiben lässt. So krass sieht es aus, wenn zwei Künstler sich nach dem Zivilisationsbruch des millionenfachen Mordes weigern, einfach zur Tagesordnung zurückzukehren.
