After meeting in the downtown galleries of New York in the late 1950s, these three artists came together to found the NO!art movement, leading a group of artists who staged a series of exhibitions that combined the disciplines of painting, sculpture, installation, and happenings. Finding its first home in the March Gallery on E. 10th Street and then moving uptown to Gallery: Gertrude Stein, the work of the NO!artists challenged the established forms and focus of the art world of the early 1960s.
This group of works represents the coalescence of the experiences of the artists, whose lives were permanently shaped by the horrors of the Second World War. Goodman and Fisher served as enlisted men in the Allied forces, as a photographer and a medic, respectively, while Lurie himself was imprisoned in a series of Nazi labor and concentration camps in Latvia, Poland, and Germany. All three men carried the experience of war with them for the rest of their lives and sought to use their art as an instrument of influence and stimulation.
Their artistic collaboration marks a shift for each artist toward a focus on the societal forces that they believed polluted the postwar capitalist order in the forms of western global hegemony, consumer culture, and financialization and exploitation of all aspects of life, including the market driven New York art world. Pulling from the commercial imagery of the day with the use of photographs torn from magazines, pornography, and objects found in the trash or on the street, each artist takes the viewer on a dizzying journey through their highly charged political and social imagery. Seeking to shake up the viewer and snap them out of the complacency induced by consumerism, these artists aimed for total unabashed self-expression in art leading to social involvement.
Lurie, Goodman, and Fisher's respective works are presented in conversation to once again ask us to take heed of our reality and question the contradictions of human existence in the ideological and creative confines of modern society. This exhibition returns these works by the founding members of the NO!art movement to New York City, many for the first time since NO!art's critical period of the early 1960s.