Museum Of Jewish Heritage Extends BORIS LURIE: NOTHING TO DO BUT TO TRY Exhibition Through November 2022

Due to an enthusiastic response, the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust announces that Boris Lurie: Nothing To Do But To Try, a first-of-its-kind exhibition on the 20th century artist and Holocaust survivor and the Museum's first contemporary art show, will be extended until November 6, 2022. The exhibition originally was scheduled to close on April 29.

"It has been an honor to have this powerful exhibition on display," says Jack Kliger, President & CEO of the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. "We are pleased to extend its run to give more visitors the opportunity to learn about the Holocaust through Mr. Lurie's first-person, artistic account."

"The Boris Lurie Art Foundation is moved by all the praise that the exhibition has received, and we are proud to be partnering with the Museum to present Mr. Lurie's lesser known, but undeniably powerful, earliest body of work," says Gertrude Stein, Director of the Boris Lurie Art Foundation.

"It has been a privilege for me to share the genius of Boris Lurie, a self-taught and deeply expressive artist, and to receive such profound feedback from visitors. I am so heartened that the exhibition succeeds in conveying some degree of the enormity of the trauma inflicted by the Holocaust through the intimate and emotional exploration of one man's loss," says Guest Curator Sara Softness.

Centered around the paintings and drawings in Lurie's so-called "War Series," as well as never-before-exhibited objects and ephemera from his personal archive, Boris Lurie: Nothing To Do But To Try presents a portrait of the artist reckoning with devastating trauma, haunting memories, and an elusive, lifelong quest for freedom. In drawing together artistic practice and historical chronicle, Boris Lurie: Nothing To Do But To Try is fertile new territory for the Museum of Jewish Heritage, offering a survivor's searing visual testimony within a significant art historical context.

Boris Lurie (1924- 2008) grew up in cosmopolitan Riga, Latvia in the 1930s. He was just 16 years old when Latvia was occupied by the Nazis in 1941, and he and his family were forcibly evacuated to a ghetto. Later that year, his mother, grandmother, sister, and girlfriend were murdered, alongside approximately 25,000 other Jews, in what would come to be known as the massacre at Rumbula. In the years that followed, Lurie and his father together survived several labor and concentration camps throughout Latvia, Poland, and Germany, until liberation from Buchenwald-Magdeburg.

Lurie created his "War Series" in the immediate aftermath of the war, following his service with the United States Counter Intelligence Corps and subsequent immigration to New York.

In nearly 100 paintings and drawings made, with few exceptions, in 1946, the "War Series" ostensibly contains Lurie's experiences of the war in a highly graphic, expressionist style: nightmarish camp scenes in riotous colors, laborers at work in striped uniforms, stark landscapes cut through with barbed wire, amorphous dream-like visions, and searing portraits. As suggested by their somewhat unfinished, chaotic style, as pages ripped from a notebook, Lurie considered these pictures a private catharsis, and never exhibited them in his lifetime.

Included in the exhibition is Lurie's only known self-portrait as a young man, in which he appears disembodied with a plaintive expression. There is also the exhibition's largest masterpiece-a ghostly concentration camp scene, 50 by 50 inches in scale, painted in 1971 after the original "War Series" was made.

Nothing To Do But To Try is the first Boris Lurie exhibition exclusively to consider the entire "War Series," alongside Lurie's original family photographs, correspondence, diary entries, and assorted ephemera, as an essential origin story for Lurie's life and work.

"The basis of my art education I obtained in a camp like Buchenwald," Lurie once wrote, alluding both to his lack of professional training and to how his traumatic experience became rich, if fraught, artistic terrain-his survival itself the ultimate creative act.

For more details on these and other events, visit: https://mjhnyc.org/current-events/

Boris Lurie: Nothing To Do But To Try is curated by Sara Softness, an interdisciplinary curator and writer.

For more information or to purchase tickets, visit: https://mjhnyc.org/exhibitions/boris-lurie-nothing-to-do-but-to-try/.