Tucked away into a back gallery on the second floor of the Chelsea Art Museum, Boris Lurie NO! was first of a series of exhibitions by the Boris Lurie Art Foundation with the goal of resurrecting a shadow movement which supplied what was missing in the officially sanctioned art of the 20th century.
Lurie's art, misunderstood and condemned (when it wasn't utterly neglected), carries a single-minded integrity of purpose missing from art today- negation screaming out against the inauthenticity of the marketplace and the art world system that supports it. The truth the artist proclaims through this negation is that art cannot proceed forward until we address the degradation and denial of the dark feminine in Western culture. The feminine face of divinity hidden beneath the commercial exploitation vehicles - the American pin-up and its iconic flattening via sixties pop glorification- the artist was condemned to expose by way of his tortured personal history.
