BORIS LURIE - LIFE WITH THE DEAD
The Center for Persecuted Arts, Solingen and The Boris Lurie Art Foundation, New York at the Scuola Grande San Giovanni, Venice
April 20-November 24, 2024
Opening on April 17, 2024
(Advance press showing and preview from April 17 through April 19, 2024)
With the exhibition LIFE WITH THE DEAD, the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, in collaboration with the museum Center for Persecuted Arts, is bringing Boris Lurie's artistic work to the public on the artist's 100th birthday. The exhibition is located in the Spazio Badoer, adjoining the church of San Giovanni at the monumental Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice-it is a perfect venue for this show. The space had once been used as a burial site, with the word Coemeterium (place of interment) written above the door. It is a site of eternity and resurrection.
Boris Lurie, was born in Leningrad in 1924 and raised in Riga. On December 8, 1941, his mother, grandmother, sister, and his first love,were murdered by the Nazis in a mass shooting in the Rumbula forest near Riga. The memory of the dead accompanied him throughout every moment of his life. Boris Lurie survived the terror of the concentration camps, and bore witness to the horrors of the Holocaust.
Co-founder of the NO!art movement, he created diverse, provocative, and occasionally extreme collages, drawings, sculptures, and texts. "There is no greater pain than to feel as a stranger among people," wrote Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Notes from the Underground, and it is this universal human experience of pain that Boris Lurie screams out in his works. On display in the Spazio Badoer of the Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista, are more than fifty works from 1950 to 1970, in addition to the significant collages and paintings, the exhibition highlights the Immigrant's NO!box, and the Shit Sculptures.
With this exhibition, we bring to the public artistic work that could hardly be more topical in these times of growing antisemitism, racism, and right-wing populism worldwide.