Greene Naftali
Publication
The Gift
Secession, Vienna.
Softcover
Color
192 pages
9 x 12 in
9783957633330
Artist Page
In a career spanning more than four decades, Lutz Bacher has built a highly heterogeneous oeuvre that defies classification. The American artist, who adopted her male pseudonym when she first started out, has produced conceptual work in a variety of media. Bacher’s photographs, sculptural arrangements, videos, sound pieces, and expansive installations incorporate images and objects that are fixed in collective memory and easily retrieved: press photographs of public figures that, copied several times over, begin to lead a strangely aesthetic new life, everyday stuff and detritus from thrift shops she integrates into her installations as objets trouvés and secondhand readymades, or time-worn baseballs, marbles, and sand. Her appropriations draw on trivial pop culture sources such as dime novels, porn magazines, self-help literature, and paparazzi snapshots, and occasionally include references to art history. The human body, sexuality, power, and violence are key issues in her art, as are our current state of being and the deliberate blurring of the line separating the private from the public sphere.