Obituaries

Boris Lurie, 83, Russian-born artist who made his career in New York, died Jan. 7 in Manhattan. In 1960, he co-founded, with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, the politically engaged NO!art group, which used an irreverent avant-garde vocabulary and sought social change through art. The name No!art expressed the group's rebellion against Abstract Expressionism and the consumerist appetites of postwar America. Intentionally provocative and often vulgar, the group attacked the harsh realities of modern times--racism, sexism, violence, alienation, colonialism, art-world commercialism, and more. The group began showing at March Gallery in New York, and throughout the '60s would regularly appear at the Gertrude Stein Gallery, where Goodman and Lurie also had solo exhibitions. From the '70s on, Lurie showed extensively in Germany and Israel.

Lurie was born in Leningrad, raised in Riga, Latvia, and was then caught up in the turmoil of WWII. His controversial and often deliberately offensive work often drew upon his having endured four years in concentration camps and the deaths of family members at the hands of the Nazis. In wall constructions and sculptures, he combined such objects as shoes, rubber hoses, wigs, chains, candles and even excrement. His boldly colored and richly layered paintings and collages frequently juxtapose horrific scenes from the Holocaust with photos of pinup girls. He also displayed images of concentration camp victims and titled them as "happenings" or "assemblages" by Hitler.

In recent years, Lurie's works were seen in group shows at Janos Gat, New York (1998, 2004) and in "NO!art and the Aesthetics of Doom" at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University and the University of Iowa Museum of Art (2001-02). In 1998, he was included in the opening exhibition of the Buchenwald Museum in Germany. A 2005 show of artists in their 80s at Clayton Gallery and Outlaw Museum on Manhattan's Lower East Side featured Lurie along with Taylor Mead, Mary Beach and Herbert Huncke. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. German artist Dietmar Kirves, also a NO!art member, maintains a Web site about the history of the movement (no-art.info).

Kim Wauson, 54, curator and gallery director, died on Jan. 29 of heart failure at his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. A native of Los Angeles, Wauson studied art and art history at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He moved to San Francisco in 1977, where he worked for a number of galleries, including Foster Goldstrom, Khiva Gallery and Cheryl Haines. He relocated to New York in 1987, and organized exhibitions of works by Max Cole, Harvey Quaytman, Max Gimblett, Susie Rosmarin and others at various venues. In 2004, Wauson was appointed director of Marlborough Gallery, Chelsea, a post he held until fall 2006.

--"Artworld" is compiled by Stephanie Cash and David Ebony

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