The Reception of the Art of Boris Lurie and NO!art
in the Context of the Holocaust Debate
in Contemporary Germany (2002)*

In this essay the authors will investigate the reception of the art of Boris Lurie and NO!art in Germany, using as examples mainly three exhibitions that took place in the 1990s. Hereby we will concentrate on those works by Boris Lurie that touch upon the Holocaust committed by German fascism and its collaborators, for this topic is of special importance regarding the work's reception in the "land of the perpetrators." We are well aware that this is only one aspect of Boris Lurie's complex work, who himself was a victim of the Nazi race-politics, for he and many of the artists associated with him in the sixties dealt in their paintings, assemblages, happenings and installations, intensively with many contemporary political themes.
Exhibitions of Boris Lurie's work in the Federal Republic of Germany took place in 1973, 1974, as well as in 1988. In 1995 a project group of the Neuen Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (NGBK) (New Association for Visual Arts) in Berlin organized the largest NO!art retrospective so far. Because there were so many more works by Boris Lurie available, the project group decided to present an additional monographic exhibition at the Haus am Kleistpark of works by Lurie, the central figure and sole survivor of the legendary triumvirate of the NO!art movement (the other two being Stanley Fisher and Sam Goodman).  read more