Testimony

Boris Lurie (1924–2008) was a Russian-American artist who lost many family members and his girlfriend in the Holocaust. Lurie himself made a narrow escape together with his father. To the end, his artistic oeuvre, created following his emigration to the United States, was an expression of what he had suffered, offering testimony of human rights violations on an inconceivable scale.

The ongoing topicality of Lurie’s radical art is the result of this approach, as documented in this exhibition marking the artist’s hundredth birthday. In partnership with the Boris Lurie Art Foundation in New York, the Neues Museum in Nuremberg (a member of the Human Rights Cities Network) cooperated on this show with Polish curator Paulina Olszewska of the renowned Galeria Studio in Warsaw. She invited ten artists from Belarus, Poland and Ukraine whose works reflect Lurie’s experiences in the present: war, political injustice and human rights violations are a sad reality in the middle of Europe, as shown by the war in Ukraine and the situation in Belarus.

In addition to Boris Lurie, the exhibition features Alexandr Adamou, Agata Bogacka, Edka Jarzab, Adam Kozicki, Sergij Petlyuk, Nadya Sayapina, Jana Shostak, Elena Subach, Michał Zawada and Anna Zvyagintseva.