Image: Ben Uri Gallery, London
Ben Uri has announced three new online exhibitions, beginning with 'Witness and Wound', which examines Boris Lurie’s recurring engagement with trauma, memory, violence and suffering.
'Witness and Wound' traces Lurie’s artistic practice across several decades, following the evolution of his visual responses to the horrors he endured and witnessed during the Holocaust and their continued reappearance in his work.
The exhibition begins with works made in the immediate years after Lurie’s liberation from the Polte Works labour camp, reflecting grief and pain through imagery centred on the fragility of the human body and the scars of Nazi persecution. Its treatment of Lurie’s 1950s works highlights the increasing prominence of dismembered and distorted figures, exploring trauma through the fractured nature of memory and emotion.
Lurie also used his practice for political and social protest as a co-founder of the NO! Art movement, challenging the commodification of art and the sanitisation of narratives surrounding colonialism, consumerism and war.
The exhibition concludes with works from the 1970s that revisit imagery first employed in the 1940s, including direct representations of the Holocaust and a refusal to allow the atrocities Lurie witnessed and suffered to be forgotten.
The online exhibition was curated in connection with 'Boris Lurie: Ever the Radical', described as the first UK exhibition of Lurie’s work and presented by Ben Uri Gallery and Museum and the Boris Lurie Art Foundation.
