Lutz Bacher
Do you love me?
14 July – 13 September 2009
Kunstverein München is pleased to presents the first comprehensive solo exhibition of American artist Lutz Bacher in Europe. “Do you love me?” is the last episode of Lutz Bachers' 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 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?”
Cinema OPEN AIR CINEMA
*23 July 2009*
Tony Scott, "Domino"
*30 July 2009_*
Zoltán Korda, "Jungle Book"
Fig:
[1] Handout for Lutz Bacher’s exhibition Do You Love Me?, Archive Kunstverein München e.V.
[2-8] Installation views: Lutz Bacher, Do You Love Me, Kunstverein München, 2009. Courtesy Kunstverein München e.V., photo: unknown.