When I first saw the artist Boris Lurie in the twilight of a New York City hallway on East 66th street, his yearning for Europe was palpable. And as we entered his studio apartment – that stunning collage of memory – it became clear to me that Lurie never mentally left the concentration camps that he had survived together with his father.
This was in October 1996. It was the beginning of a long friendship, at the start of which there was a film. Fluxus and Happening artist Wolf Vostell, in his own familiar forceful manner, had brought my attention to Lurie's disturbing artworks: concentration camp victims, ghostly figures between hope of life and brokenness. Surrounded by pin-up girls in unambiguous poses. Not an artist's pornographic whim, but a concept to disclose the connection between sex and power, wealth and corruption. Boris Lurie had made the beautiful and the naked, the ones who were gassed and those who escaped, his artistic subject. Constantly juggling on a knife edge in the mine field of voyeuristic art and pure horror. In his art as well as his life, he surrendered to neither.

Thanks to the Boris Lurie Art Foundation and its director Gertrude Stein – Boris's gallerist and closest friend – I am able, twenty years after producing the short movie in Manhattan, to present my hour-long film THE ART OF BORIS LURIE. A film which forms a dialogue with the 2016 retrospective at the Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) but is characterized by my encounters with Boris Lurie and his art.

My dialogue partners in the film are Cilly Kugelmann, program director, and Helmut F. Braun, curator of the Lurie exhibit at JMB; Peter Weibel, director of the ZKM Karlsruhe, artist and self-confessed fan of Boris Lurie; New York art restorer and artist Ron Morosan; Aldo Tambellini, American avant garde filmmaker and a friend of Lurie's.

And, of course, Gertrude Stein and Boris Lurie...

My film is intended to serve as a dialogue between all parties: the living as well as the dead. And in this process of discourse and contradictions I could not, and did not want to, resist the temptation of construing Lurie's work in ways that go beyond common interpretation, for I am convinced that risky views and opinions, if nothing else, are what drives and enhances the public discussion on the art and the artist.

I have chosen to focus on the artist's art – and on its preconditions. I have done so because I view his art as the true key to the story of the life of my friend Boris Lurie: born in Leningrad in 1924. Died in New York City in 2008.

Buried in Israel.