The exhibition NO!art, pin-ups, excrement, protest, jew-art by artist Boris Lurie showcases more than 50 works in two-dimensional formats and sculptural works, created by the artist from the mid-1940s to the '70s.
The exhibition opens on May 3 at the Contemporary Arts Museum, and it is the only international exhibition of the period, with which the museum begins to celebrate its 75 years of history.
Founder of the NO!art movement, Boris Lurie, was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in 1924. In 1941, at the age of 16, he was taken prisoner by the Nazi regime and spent 4 years in different concentration camps. His mother, his sister, and his grandmother were shot in the Rumbula woods outside Riga.
The Rumbula massacre was one of the greatest atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, where over the course of two days some 25,000 Jews were killed. After his release, Lurie moved to New York where he began his artistic career, strongly marked by his experience as a holocaust survivor.
The main goal of NO!art, a movement he co-founded with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher in the early 1960s, was to bring real life themes back into art. Therefore, he opposed the two most popular movements of the time, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Most critics and curators of the time rejected Lurie's work and claims. However, the artist continued to produce highly charged political and social images, and in 1963 his now-famous Railroad Collage, which superimposed a pin-up girl in front of concentration camp victims, made a major impact.
How to frame the work of Boris Lurie in the Chilean context? The curators of the exhibition, Mariagrazia Muscatello and Montserrat Rojas, point out that "There is undoubtedly a relationship based on the experience of the deprivation of human rights in Nazi Germany and in the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile; like exile forced by ethnic and political persecution. These historical events create a trans-temporal narrative that opens another look at the artist's production." Also typical of his work are the "commodification, both in the art world and in sex and the business world."
For his part, Daniel Cruz, director of the museum, points out: "Presenting this exhibition of artist Boris Lurie at MAC Parque Forestal is a source of pride for us. This is the only international exhibition of the period with which the museum begins to celebrate its 75 years of existence. In addition, it is the first time that the work of this Russian-born artist has been exhibited in Chile.
Boris Lurie's exhibition is part of an axis of exhibitions that propose critical reflections about sociopolitical aspects, the role of art with its context from its own language that derives in a criticism of its own medium. In this particular case, we see the possibilities of art from experiences of the artist as dark as the holocaust. Lurie's account can establish parallel passages with the local history and also with the other eight exhibitions with which he will coexist in the museum."