Boris Lurie was born in 1924 in Leningrad. In 1925, his family fled from the anti-Semitic pogroms to Riga, where Boris Lurie was raised. After the invasion of the Soviet Union by the German Wehrmacht, Lurie suffered with his father for four long years, first in Latvian labor camps and later in German concentration camps. On November 30 and December 8, 1941, about 25,000 Jews were murdered by Germans in the pine forest of Rumbula. His grandmother, mother, sister and childhood sweetheart were shot on December 8, 1941. Lurie and his father were liberated from a camp near Magdeburg by American troops. After liberation, Lurie, who spoke English, worked for the US Army. In 1946, he emigrated to New York with his father and became an artist on the Lower East Side. In 1959, he and friends, Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, conceived and launched the NO!art movement as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism and the emerging Pop Art styles. Driven by anti-Pop sentiments, Lurie attacked the complacent consumer society with his provocative art. After the death of his father, Lurie suddenly stopped making paintings and objects and began working on his novel House of Anita, which he finished shortly before his death in 2008 in New York. The German translation of House of Anita is now being published by Wallstein Verlag, and the Center for Persecuted Arts is presenting more than 100 works by Lurie to accompany it. In the book, as in his artworks, Boris Lurie deals with his experiences in the concentration camp and with shocking urgency, questions the meaning of art after the Shoah. The first-person narrator Bobby lives together with three other slaves in the "House of Anita" and is forced by the mistresses to engage in sexual fetish practices. What appears on the surface to be a pornographic S/M novel is a provocative depiction and psychological dissection of Nazi atrocities. A book and exhibition that causes pain and is an extraordinary, artistic treatment of the Holocaust, terror, and violence.
Supported by the Boris Lurie Art Foundation in New York, the Centre for Persecuted Arts has selected works by Boris Lurie for the exhibition in Solingen: early drawings, the War series, and the fetish images of the Love series, as well as the painful portraits of his mother, sister, and girlfriend. The president of the foundation, Gertrude Stein, was Boris Lurie's lifelong friend and gallerist.