BORIS LURIE TV-PORTRAIT, 1996 | Reportage by Rudij Bergmann in BERGMANNs ART, Mainz. - Video/CD, 12 minutes. | Broadcast on 6.11.1996, at 10.15 p.m. in SÜDWEST 3, Mainz. | Boris Lurie, arrived in New York more than fifty years ago... In his luggage the oppressive burden of memory... of his younger sister, for example ... Present and past... Like her mother, her sister was deported by the Nazis in Riga in 1941. They too have a grave in the skies. Boris Lurie... an art that has never been solely about art and that derives its aesthetic categories from the artist's many and contradictory experiences and whose timelessness is a current one. What has happened has been. ►video
NO!art MAN BORIS LURIE, 2001 | Documentary by Amikam Goldman, New York 1999-2001, color 16 mm, 82 min. | "NO!art Man" tells the life story of Boris Lurie as a young artist in New York after World War II through the years he was active with his NO!art Group and into the present. It documents the many striking transitions in his life, from being ignored by the art establishment, to increasing contemporary prominence, as when German artists showed an interest in his work and invited him to exhibit at the former East-German concentration camp Buchenwald, where he had been imprisoned. The film discusses both his initial loneliness in New York City, where he felt alienated, and current recognition as evidenced by a major retrospective which opened in Chicago, at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, in November 2001. This exhibition presented the work of Lurie and other NO!art artists for the first time in America. The film is based on conversations between the director, Amikam Goldman, and Boris Lurie, from their first meeting in 1999 through 2001. The film also includes interviews with art historians, and artist friends of Boris Lurie. ►video
optimistic - disease - facility, 2003 | Documentary by Naomi Tereza Salmon, Weimar/New York 2003, 58 min. | After meeting the artist Naomi Tereza Salmon (who lives and works in Germany), at Buchenwald during the retrospective exhibition of his works in 1998/99, he gave her permission to document his apartment, studio and storage space. A dialogue developed, covering a range of issues, mainly about the past, about living in New York, about the Palestinian issue, including discussions on Stalin and capitalism. The film is a result of this encounter, laconically trying to capture the authentic situation, and was made as a low budget project. Considering the fact that Lurie is the founder of the No!art movement, the making of the film is inspired by its manifest, which presents an opposition to american mass culture and to the commercalizing process of art, putting in question the scene of mainstream and pop art, creating a genuine ideological and fundamental aesthetic approach of its own. ►video
SHOAH AND PIN-UPS: The NO!-Artist Boris Lurie, 2006 | Portrait by Matthias Reichelt and Reinhild Dettmer-Finke, Freiburg (Germany) 2006, 88 min, DV-Cam. | SHOAH AND PIN-UPS is a film about breaking a taboo. In his work the 80-year-old New York NO!artist, Boris Lurie, brings together what doesn't belong together: gassed corpses and the naked, the Shoah and pin-ups. It¹s not perverted art, but a comment on a perverted society, says Lurie, and he draws a line from the Shoah to the war in Iraq. Lurie would have liked to have painted comfortable, comforting things, like the Impressionists did, but something kept him from doing so. And that something is what this film explores. The search takes us via Riga and Buchenwald to the New York of the 50s and 60s, when NO!art developed as an reaction to Pop Art. Boris Lurie¹s motto is NO! to the expectations of the art market, NO! to bourgeois estehtics, NO! to victim mentality. A film about the timeless/timely questions of remembering, and about coping, through art, with the extermination of the Jews. ►video
THE ART OF BORIS LURIE 2016 | Video by Rudij Bergmann | When I first saw the artist Boris Lurie in the twilight of a hallway on East 66th Street in New York, it was tangibly close, his longing for Europe. And when we entered the studio apartment - this breathtaking collage of memory - it was clear to me: Lurie had never quite mentally left the concentration camps he survived together with his father. That was in October 1996. It was the beginning of a long friendship, at the start of which was a film. The Fluxus and Happening artist Wolf Vostell had drawn my attention to Lurie's disturbing pictorial works with his well-known forcefulness: concentration camp prisoners, ghostly gestures between hope for life and brokenness; surrounded by pin-up girls in unambiguous poses. Not a pornographic whim of the artist, but concept to expose the connection between sex and power, wealth and corruption. Boris Lurie had made the beautiful and the naked, the gassed and the escaped, his, though not the only, artistic theme. Always juggling on the knife's edge in the minefield between voyeuristic pleasure and pure horror. In art and life he has capitulated neither to the one nor to the other. ►video
