Lutz Bacher
b. 1952, United States
d. 2019
Lutz Bacher lived most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although she began making work in the 1970s, she attracted a particular and passionate following through shows in New York during the early 1990s. Later, she made a number of solo institutional exhibitions including at MoMA PS1, New York (2009), the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2013) and Secession, Vienna (2016).
Bacher’s work oscillates between the conceptual and the visceral. Much of it involves appropriation, using material from American popular culture and flotsam from the information age (pulp fiction, self-help manuals, trade magazines, scientific publications, pornography, bureaucracy, discarded photographs), in work that can be intimate, violent or funny. Bacher often played with her own visibility, making use of personal conversations, relationships and diaristic recordings while working under an assumed name.