Boris Lurie, a Buchenwald survivor whose art reflects the torment and loss of the Holocaust, will be among the three artists the Washington gallery Charles Krause/ Reporting Fine Art (link is external)will show at this year's (e)merge art fair, October 4-6.
"Discovering Lurie's work in a dusty Long Island City warehouse was for me much the same as discovering a lost civilization," Krause said.
"What we have here is an entire body of work by a great artist who sought to work out his anger, his loss, his guilt, his hopes and his dreams on paper and canvas after he was liberated from Buchenwald. This is the tough art of a tough man, a survivor who lived to create a charged and meaningful visual record for those who died."
Charles Krause/Reporting Fine Art will also show the work of Jerzy Janiszewski, the Polish graphic artist who created the now iconic logo for Lech Walesa's Solidarity trade union, and of KM Ramich, a contemporary American artist from North Carolina whose work reflects her strongly held views on issues such as gun control and the environment.
The Krause gallery is dedicated exclusively to showing the work of artists motivated by their belief that visual images can play an important role influencing positive social and/or political change.
Boris Lurie (1924-2008) survived more than four years in Nazi death camps during World War II before his liberation from Buchenwald in 1945 at the age of 21. His powerful and artistically significant work, which spans a period of more than 60 years between his resettlement in New York in 1946 and his death in 2008, speaks to the psychological and emotional trauma and loss suffered by the estimated 6 million Jews who perished, and those who survived, the Holocaust.
Lurie's paintings, collages, assemblages and other work also reflect the artist's strongly held "progressive" political views, controversial during the 1950s and '60s at the height of the Cold War, critical of U.S. dependence on nuclear deterrence; McCarthyism; the social conformity and superficiality of American culture; and his conviction that artists had a responsibility to engage with, and use their work and creativity to influence, the political and social environment in which they lived. In 1960, Lurie founded the No!Art Movement in New York, in part to register his opposition to Pop Art and what he saw as its celebration of the consumerism and materialism in place of values he thought more important.Largely ignored and infrequently exhibited during his lifetime, Lurie left an estate of well over 2,000 works of art, virtually all the work he ever created, including an extraordinary set of "secret" drawings depicting what he saw and experienced in the death camps; these Holocaust drawings from the 1940's are now on display for the first time in New York.
Art historians who have seen the Lurie estate, now controlled by the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, believe that as more of his work is exhibited publicly, he will come to be viewed as one of the 20th century's great masters, the artist whose work represents the enormity of the suffering and loss that was the Holocaust. Lurie's work has never before been seen, or offered for sale, in Washington.