Boris Lurie: Pennings Poemings

It is the banality of oblivion that appears incomprehensible and intolerable to Boris Lurie. Evil is familiar to the Holocaust survivor. He has experienced it closely, repeatedly: »THE TRAGEDY IS / (RE)PERFORMED / (BE)FOR(E) ME / TO A HITLER AUDIENCE OF MILLIONS / FOR ME ALONE«. Lurie confronts postwar society with the past through his provocative and political art that does not want to be art, and also through his writing. His hard, hermetic associations keep the reader at a distance while revealing Lurie’s most intimate struggle. His texts and poems, published in 2003 under the title ›Geschriebigtes – Gedichtigtes, NO!art in Buchenwald‹, have now been translated into English by Andrew Shields. The illustrations first publication are taken from »Dance Hall Series« by Boris Lurie from 1961.

Boris Lurie was born in 1924 to a Jewish family in Leningrad, grew up in Riga, and with his father survived the Stutthof and Buchenwald concentration camps. His mother, grandmother, younger sister, and childhood sweetheart were murdered in 1941 in a mass shooting. These experiences left a lasting impression on Boris Lurie’s life. In 1946, he immigrated to New York. In 1959, he founded the NO!art movement with a group of artist friends set against Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, but especially opposed to the economization of art and devoted to political issues such as racism, sexism, and consumerism. Boris Lurie died in New York on 7 January 2008.