Curated by Felipe Chaimovich and developed with support from the Boris Lurie Foundation, the Jewish Museum of São Paulo presents "Boris Lurie - Art, Grief and Survival", an exhibition that traverses the artist's legacy through 44 collages, drawings, paintings and sculptures guided by the memory of the Holocaust and oftentimes incorporating a strong erotic component and sadomasochism.
Boris Lurie was born in 1924 in Leningrad, Russia, and raised in Riga, Latvia, until the Nazi invasion in 1941, when his family was imprisoned in the Riga Ghetto. Shortly after, most of his female family members were murdered in the Rumbula forest, while Lurie and his father were imprisoned in a series of labor and concentration camps. Lurie and his father were liberated from Buchenwald-Magdeburg in 1945 and with the help of his older sister in New York, emigrated to the U.S. in 1946.
This exhibition explores Lurie's artistic development and how art would allow him to express his memory in new ways. This process is felt, for example, through "Portrait of My Mother Before Shooting," from 1947, a recollection of the maternal figure and a key work in his journey of mourning/creation. From this time on, images of women became permanent in his work, as well as the yellow Star of David - a symbol that marked Jewish people during the Nazi regime and which the artist continued to use on his clothes after emigrating to the United States.
"Boris Lurie produced paintings and objects with the yellow star, using it in underwear, such as underpants and corsets," writes the curator, pointing out the inseparability between death and desire in the artist's work. "In his refusal to forget, his garments continued to witness a relentless survival," Chaimovich adds.
Active in the post-war New York avant-garde scene, Lurie used advertising language and the North American mass media to develop his "pin-ups." From 1955 on, he produced collages criticizing the objectification of the female body and, in 1959, he founded NO!art, a movement against the values of the consumer society, created together with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher. In 1975, Lurie returned to Riga for the first time since World War II, and began writing his memoirs, which, together with his novel House of Anita, were published posthumously.
"An artist who survived not sustained by art, but because of it," suggests Felipe Arruda, Executive Director of the Jewish Museum of São Paulo. "An artist who confronted and re-elaborated all throughout his life the images of the horror witnessed, who vocalized in his work the protest against antisemitism, who manipulated sex signs, propaganda, consumerism, power and death to build a critical artwork, and unavoidably, sometimes disturbing."