The confrontational work of artists Boris Lurie (1924 -2008) and Wolf Vostell (1932 - 1998) comes together for the first time in the exhibition Art after Auschwitz. It is these two artists who radically placed the Shoah (the Hebrew equivalent of the Holocaust) at the center of their art from the late 1950s. In a period when the war was unmentionable for many, they chose to create art that confronts the viewer with this painful past. By combining the most gruesome images of war crimes with superficial advertisements, their work is at the same time an indictment of the post-war consumer society, which continued unabated and did not do justice to the trauma suffered by Jews and others.
After meeting in New York in the early 1960s, the American Lurie and the German Vostell maintained a close friendship, of which many years of correspondence still bear witness. A selection of these letters is made public for the first time in Kunst na Auschwitz. In addition to these letters, dozens of paintings, drawings and objects by both Lurie and Vostell are on display. Vostell's installation Thermoelektronischer Kaugummi from 1970, which can travel once from Museum Ostwall after a recent restoration, will also be on display in the Kunstmuseum.
Boris Lurie
As a victim of the Shoah, art was a form of trauma processing for Lurie. Lurie was born in 1924 in Leningrad, Russia, and grew up in Riga, Latvia. At the age of sixteen, his grandmother, mother, sister and childhood sweetheart were murdered by the Nazis and he and his father were imprisoned in various labor and concentration camps, including Polte (a subcamp of Buchenwald). A year after the liberation, Lurie emigrated to New York and started making art there. During his life he produced numerous paintings, collages and objects. In the early days he made figurative work, dark drawings in which he depicts his traumatic experiences. The paintings in the Dismembered Women series are expressions of his lifelong fixation on an extremely ambivalent image of women. It fluctuates between desire and aversion, between strength and vulnerability, and between integrity and fragmentation. They are always obese figures, where the natural proportions between the body parts have completely disappeared. The series goes back to Lurie's loss of his female relatives in 1941. Later he starts making collages, of which Railroad Collage (Railroad to America) from 1963 is the best known and most controversial example. In this work, Lurie places a pin-up model on a wagon where the bodies of Holocaust victims are piled up. In the 1970s, Lurie switched to writing. Until the end of his life he works on his novel, House of Anita, and his memoirs, In Riga.
Lurie's work bears witness to a humanity that has proven itself capable of murdering millions. With his confrontational oeuvre he accuses society of not wanting to account for these crimes. Placing the most horrible images of war between everyday advertisements was one of Lurie's ways of exposing social silence and looking away. In doing so, he detested the art market that was more interested in financial profit than artistic expression. Based on this conviction, he started the NO!art movement in 1959 together with artists Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher. At a time when visually attractive, in his eyes apolitical, art such as Pop Art was popular, NO!art's main aim was to undisguised the reality of post-war society. Themes such as oppression, violence and sex were not shunned here. Until his death in 2008, Lurie remained active as an artist and writer. His work is represented in leading collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, MUMOK in Vienna and the Jüdisches Museum Berlin.
Wolf Vostel
During World War II, German Wolf Vostell flees to the Czech Republic with his parents. After Vostell returns to Germany after the traumatic war years, he starts making art. His work is a reaction to the spasmodic, sometimes negating attitude that Germany adopted after the Second World War with regard to the Shoah and the many victims. In Vostell's eyes, Germans enjoyed the economic recovery without any sense of guilt and the National Socialist past was completely repressed. In the 1960s and 1970s he confronted German society by presenting art in the public space in which the war past and consumer society are central. In the 1969 performance Besetzungen, for example, Vostell is regarded as a pioneer of performance, installation and video art, and sculpture in public space. In the 1950s, Vostell began tearing down and disassembling posters in Paris with the aim of deconstructing the superficiality of the advertising world. In the early 1960s, Vostell became a driving force behind Fluxus, an art movement that elevated everyday things into art, agitating against the elitism of the art world. He often integrated TV sets into his work to question the manipulation of television, but also used the medium to spread his innovative video art. Vostell gained fame with spectacular performances, in which he poured concrete over cars in public, for example, which were also captured on video.