Lutz Bacher, Little People (magician), 2005, Color Polaroids, 60,1 x 50,8 cm.
Lutz Bacher, Red Gaps, 2009, Celebrity portraits for AD Campaign, Color Photographs, plex, frame, Je 101,6 x 72,4 x 3,5 cm.
Lutz Bacher, OZ, 2008, Photolitho mounted on cardboard, 10,2 x 10,2 x 5,1 cm. |
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Kunstverein München
Galeriestraße 4
+ 49-(0)89-221 152
München
Do you love me?
Lutz Bacher
July 4-September 13, 2009
The first comprehensive solo exhibition of American artist Lutz Bacher in Europe. Do you love me? is the last episode of Lutz Bacher's exhibition trilogy that further encompasses Spill, (Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis) and My Secret Life, (PS1/MoMA, New York City).
Working since the mid 1970s out of Berkeley, California and during the 1980s in close affiliation with Pat Hearn Gallery, New York City the elusive Lutz Bacher has for the past decades enjoyed the status of an "artist's artist." Lutz Bacher, whose real identity remains hidden from the art public, stages herself as a shape shifting character. Constantly constructing fractured and conflicting identities, Bacher creates a body of work that is formed by interferences, superposition and dissolution. From interventions into the exhibition space, video installations, fanzine-like books, interviews, manipulated comic books, porn magazines or televised rape trials: in her sphere Marilyn Monroe crosses the path of "Trolls," hyenas bite the "Wizard of Oz" while penetrating Gap advertising campaigns. Lutz Bacher contaminates assumed visual worlds with traces of perversion, idiosyncrasy and sexual ambiguity — conventions of identity and power are destabilized until they finally collapse.
Within the series of exhibitions Spill, My Secret Life and Do you love me? the three institutions focus on different aspects of Bacher`s work. The especially for Kunstverein München produced exhibition attends to Bacher`s humorous picking away of the American Dream, respectively to its media manifestation. Here Bacher moves between secrecy and desire, perversion and love, control and self-control; evoking sites of an imminent breakdown of fixed identities, creating fractures that reveal the material as well as the psychological contradictions of an dream cum nightmare that is constantly driven by the question Do you love me?
Bacher’s career is marked by restrained yet comprehensive interventions into exhibition frameworks, highlighting her particular pairing of work and context. Early works in still photography and its various reproduction methods, such as The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (1976) and Jackie and Me (1989), delineate a constellation of concerns involving gender, sexuality, violence, and power. The intersection of Bacher’s two-dimensional work with time-based projects such as Olympiad (1997), Closed Circuit (1997-2000), and Manhatta (1999), further reveals that in Bacher’s work, the processes of illumination and obliteration (of image, of subject, of author) are consistent, perhaps cumulative across mediums and timeframes.
Lutz Bacher (ca. *1945) lives and works in Berkeley, California. Solo exhibitions: 2009, PS1/MOMA (New York); 2008, Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis), Taxter & Spengemann (New York); 2006, Ratio 3 (San Francisco); 2004, American Fine Arts (New York); Group exhibitions: 2008, Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); 2007, Marc Selwyn Fine Art (Los Angeles), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); 2006 PS 1/MomA (New York).
Lutz Bacher, Big Glass, 2009, glass, wood, metal, glue, 212 x 113 x 2,5 cm.
Lutz Bacher, Red Gaps, 2009, Celebrity portraits for AD Campaign, Color Photographs, plex, frame, Je 101,6 x 72,4 x 3,5 cm. |
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