Boris Lurie:
Searching for Truth in Holocaust Images
Featuring Eckhart Gillen, PhD, Berlin (Germany)
February 1, 2022 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
| FreeIn Claude Lanzmann’s seminal nine-and-a-half-hour film SHOAH, he chose not to use any images of the Holocaust, telling the story instead solely through the words of witnesses. By contrast, art historian Georges Didi-Huberman and contemporary artist Gerhard Richter have both emphasized the power of images to reflect and educate—the former in his book Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, and the latter in a series of paintings titled “Birkenau.”
Join the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Fritz Ascher Society for a lecture exploring the tension between these different perspectives on images, words, and the Holocaust with German art historian and curator Eckhart Gillen. Gillen grounds the discussion in the example of Boris Lurie, the subject of the Museum’s special exhibition Boris Lurie: Nothing To Do But To Try, who used art to access his buried memories before he was able to address them with words.
Eckhart Gillen, PhD is an independent Curator based in Berlin. He has organized numerous exhibitions and published widely on Russian, American, and German art of the twentieth century. Among his exhibition catalogs and books are „Amerika – Traum und Depression 1920/40“, Akademie der Künste, Berlin 1980;
„German Art from Beckmann to Richter: Images of a Divided Country“; Yale University Press 1997; in collaboration with Stephanie Barron he curated „Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures 1945-1989“, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg, Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin 2009; „Feindliche Brüder? Der Kalte Krieg und die deutsche Kunst 1945-1989“, Berlin 2009; R.B.Kitaj – The Retrospective, Jewish Museum Berlin, Jewish Museum London and Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2012; “Art in Europe 1945-1968: Facing the Future”, BOZAR, Brussels, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Pushkin Museum, Moscow, 2016/17; „FLASHES OF THE FUTURE. The Art of the 68ers“, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, 2018; „Constructing the World. Art and Economy 1919 to 1939 in USA, Soviet Union and Germany“ at Kunsthalle Mannheim, 2018/19.
Since 2013, Eckhart is adjunct professor for art history at the Film University in Potsdam-Babelsberg.
His exhibition Boris Lurie & Wolf Vostell: Art After Auschwitz just opened at The Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands, where it will be on view until May 29th [LINK TO The Kunstmuseum Den Haag]
Courtesy of the Boris Lurie Art Foundation
