NUREMBERG.- Neues Museum Nuremberg (NMN), in collaboration with the Boris Lurie Art Foundation is presenting the work of Jewish artist Boris Lurie in dialogue with works by Zoë Buckman, Fancy Feast, and Marsha Pels. Testimony continues the theme of the 2024 exhibition Testimony. Boris Lurie and Contemporary Art from Eastern Europe, which recontextualized Lurie’s War Series in conversation with young artists from Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine. While the previous exhibition focused on Lurie’s perspective on war, Testimony now centers on his distorted depiction of women, as seen in his series Dismembered Women and Pinups. These are set against the works of contemporary artists who, like Lurie, explore their own relationships to sexuality, bodily violence, trauma, and family history through a Jewish lens, while challenging and deconstructing the male-dominated discourse both artistically and conceptually.

Boris Lurie (1924–2008) was a self-taught artist and co-founder of the NO!art movement. His work encompasses assemblages, collages, paintings, and texts, confronting war, violence, consumer society, pornography, and the art market. Lurie survived several concentration camps and emigrated to New York in 1946. In 1959, he co-founded NO!art with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, advocating political engagement, social responsibility, and unflinching self-expression, while rejecting Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. The movement began at the March Gallery on East 10th Street and later exhibited at the uptown Gallery: Gertrude Stein, gaining attention with provocative shows such as Doom, Involvement, and Vulgar.

Jewish artists Zoë Buckman, Fancy Feast, and Marsha Pels, like Lurie, live in New York and explore shifts in attitudes toward Jewish identity, femininity, and self-representation through sculpture, textile, and video works. New York based curator Sara Softness places these works in relation to Lurie’s, introducing feminist perspectives to expand the previously male-dominated interpretive framework. In the exhibition, the artists’ works are presented in three thematic chapters alongside Lurie’s: Re-membered, Out of the ash / I rise, and I carry them within me. In this context, Lurie’s representations are seen in a new light.

Conceptual artist Zoë Buckman (b. 1985) addresses themes of the body, trauma, and female empowerment in her interdisciplinary practice. Fancy Feast (b. 1988) brings her unique perspective as a burlesque performer, author, and sex educator. Marsha Pels (b. 1950), a sculptor and installation artist, explores power, politics, femininity, and her personal family history. Central to her work is the Hitler Vitrines series, in which crystal-cast objects—such as a spine, gas mask, pistol, boots, and skull—are displayed. This series was developed during a Fulbright research stay in northern Germany, where Pels investigated her German-Jewish roots.