Testimony
Boris Lurie and Jewish women artists from New York
26.09.2025 - 01.02.2026 ,
Neues Museum - Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design Nürnberg (Nuremberg State Museum of Art and Design)
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"Testimony" opens a dialogue between the work of Boris Lurie and the works of Zoë Buckman (b. 1985), Fancy Feast (b. 1988) and Marsha Pels (b. 1948) - three contemporary Jewish artists whose sculptures, textiles and video works explore changing attitudes to Jewishness, self-expression and femininity.
Images of women permeate the entire oeuvre of Boris Lurie (1924-2008). In his works, the artist, who was also Jewish, spent 1941-1945 in a concentration camp and emigrated to the USA after the end of the war in 1946, mixes sex and death, excitement and disgust, humiliation and dignity. This ambivalence was his way of dealing with the trauma of the Holocaust. Lurie had lost almost all of his female relatives in the massacre of Rumbula (near Riga) in 1941. In view of the fact that the women had to undress before their execution, he spoke of the "greatest striptease of all time". His horror at this inhumanity is expressed in the exhibition with the series of works entitled Dismembered Women.
The exhibition was conceived by US curator Sara Softness, who works for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. It questions the previous discourse surrounding Lurie's work by expanding the male-centred interpretative framework to include a feminist perspective.
Last edited on 02.02.2026
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