»The Art of Boris Lurie« cinematically explores the artistic depths and intricacies of the artist Boris Lurie, who was born in Leningrad in 1924 and survived the Riga Ghetto and the Stutthof and Buchenwald concentration camps together with his father.

The documentary, filmed by director Rudij Bergmann, focuses on the art of the artist and on their prerequisites, which Bergmann considers the key to the history of his friend, who died in New York in 2008. It was exhibited for the first time at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and at the 12th Festival of German Film in Ludwigshafen. Director Rudij Bergmann, who has become famous for his TV art programme »BergmannsART« and various TV documentaries for the German-French TV channel Arte, met artist Boris Lurie, who died in 2008, for the first time in the twilight of a hallway on 66th Street, East, in New York in October 1996. It was the beginning of a long friendship, at the start of which was a film. The Fluxus and Happening artist Wolf Vostell made Bergmann aware of Lurie’s unsettling sculptures. Concentration camp prisoners, ghostly shapes between life hope and brokenness; surrounded by pin-up girls in explicit poses. Not a pornographic mood of the artist, but a concept to expose the connection between sex and power, wealth and corruption.

Boris Lurie’s artistic focus was on beauty and nudity, the gassed and the escaped, the Cold War, the American faults and the economisation of art. Always juggling on a knife edge in the minefield of voyeuristic passion and pure horror.

The dialogue partners in the film include Peter Weibel, director of the ZKM and artist and professed Boris Lurie fan, Cilly Kugelmann, programme director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin together with American avant-garde filmmaker and Lurie friend Aldo Tambellini, to whom a retrospective exhibition is currently dedicated in the ZKM. And of course, Boris Lurie and Gertrude Stein, Boris’ gallery owner and his closest confidante and director of today’s Lurie Art Foundation.

Organization / Institution

ZKM | Karlsruhe