A Big No

The Boris Lurie exhibition in Havana is open  at the Universal Art Building of the National Fine Arts Museum

By: Rubén Ricardo Infante

A great exhibition from this artist is open at the Universal Art Building of the National Fine Arts Museum since last Friday. Under the title Boris Lurie in Havana, the works of one of the most irreverent artists with the trappings of the market and its laws; in his works he approached the symbolic, cultural and media dominance of the contemporary age.

I was lucky to be accompanied by the painter Ben Jones and the poet David López Ximeno during a tour; for Jones, the works convey poweful messages against human and political hypocresy characterizing the context in which the creator consolidated his critical perspective.

For Gertrude Strein, chairwoman of the Boris Lurie Art Foundation (BLAF): “Havana’s exhibition is the greatest tribute to Boris, and very thankful for its celebration nine years after his death. Thanks to those who will see it in Cuba for the opportunity you give us to share a person of great artistic and humanitarian stature.”

Regarding this, The director of the exhibition and the Museum Jorge Fernández stated in the catalogue that: “seeing so many key works of a creator as important as Lurie will allow us to approach a man who rose against horror, on a pilgrimage which led him to hate all totalitarian regimes.”

Before going into the hall, three suitcases reveal the expressive power Lurie was able to stamp on them, his life was like an eternal symbol of pilgrimage. For those who emigrated the suitcases were a small box to arrange memories, to carry the past times, the family memory, time. All this compose these suitcases he named Immigrant´s NO! Suitcase (Anti-Pop), 1963.

He was born in Leningrad in 1924, born of a Jewish family, Lurie’s life was marked by Nazism and he had to take refuge in New York, the city where he lived until he died in 2008. In the 1950s Lurie joined a creative universe where abstract expressionism and Pop art were the established artistic trends, and through which he is not allowed to express his reflections on a supposed happy world. As a response, in the early 1960s, alongside Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher he created the No!art group, to voice the silenced cries of protests. With this group a counter-cultural movement was established.

The city of New York hosted the first exhibitions of the group and the following were Rome and Milan.

The Boris… exhibition will be open until next November.

Translated by ESTI