Image: Ben Uri Gallery, London
An exhibition devoted to Boris Lurie (1924, Leningrad – 2008, New York), a Holocaust survivor who became one of the founders of New York's NO!art movement, opens at the Oxo Gallery, Oxo Tower Wharf, on London's South Bank on 24 September 2026. Organised by Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, 'Boris Lurie: Ever the Radical' runs until 11 October 2026, with free entry from 11am to 6pm. A private view is scheduled for Wednesday 23 September, 6.30pm to 8pm.
Ben Uri presents the show as the first exhibition in the UK devoted to Lurie. According to the gallery's press release, it brings together almost 40 works made between 1946 and 2003, spanning nearly six decades of his career.
Lurie was raised in a prosperous Jewish family in Riga. He and his father survived the Riga Ghetto, forced labour and the camps of Lenta, Salaspils, Stutthof and Buchenwald, and were liberated by US forces at the Magdeburg-Polte subcamp in April 1945; his mother, grandmother, younger sister and first love were killed in the Rumbula Massacre of December 1941. Father and son emigrated to New York in 1946, the year Lurie began the War Series of drawings, gouaches and paintings.
The press release records that Lurie was among the co-founders of the March Gallery in New York in 1957 and, with Stanley Fisher and Sam Goodman, developed NO!art as a counterpoint to Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and the commercialisation of the avant-garde. Working across painting, photography, assemblage and collage, he set images of Nazi atrocities against motifs from consumer culture and pin-up photography to raise questions about memory, voyeurism and denial.
The Oxo Gallery is the host venue; the exhibition is organised by Ben Uri, which is based at 108a Boundary Road, St John's Wood, London. Ben Uri's own galleries are concurrently showing 'Disruptors', which closes on 4 September 2026, and 'The Abbey Art Centre as Postwar Refuge: 1946–56' opens there on 7 October 2026. Neither forms part of the Lurie project.
