The Jewish Museum Berlin is dedicating a major retrospective show to Boris Lurie and his radical artistic examination of the 20th century. Lurie is an artist who demanded political relevance from art and the art market. His much-discussed and controversial works accuse society of shirking coming to terms with its crimes against humanity by packing evidence of them between advertising and everyday banalities.
His collages confront the viewer with the experience of persecution and prison camp in the Nazi era, provoking "horror and fascination" (Volkhard Knigge). For Lurie's work reveals disgust toward a humanity that proved itself capable of exiling and murdering millions as well as revulsion against a self-satisfied art market more interested in financial profit than in artistic expression. His drawings, however, strike a different tone. In "War Series" of 1946, Lurie created an initial inventory of his own experience of persecution and camp imprisonment during the Nazi regime while his "Dancehall Series" of the 1950s and '60s depicts poetic images of his time.
The exhibition is organized in cooperation and with the generous support of the Boris Lurie Art Foundation in New York.