LUTZ BACHER
'Do you love me?'

4 July – 13 September 2009
Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany


Female art work on media constructions

US artist Lutz Bacher's first comprehensive solo exhibition in Europe with the title 'Do you love me?' will run from 4th July until 13th September 2009 at the Kunstverein München.

The female artist Lutz Bacher (born ca. 1945, living since 1975 in Berkeley, California) presents with 'Do you love me?' the last episode of her exhibition trilogy after 'Spill' (Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis) and 'My Secret Life' (PS1/MoMA, New York City).

Lutz Bacher's work is about the construction of identity - especially the female one through media in today's society. Therefore she de-constructs the identities by 'interfering' advertising campaigns, she manipulates comic books, interviews, porn magazines or televised rape trials.

Lutz Bacher destabilizes the conventions of identity and power until they finally collapse.

fig.: Jokes (1987 – 1988) Marilyn. B/W Photograph mounted on aluminum 76,2 x 101,6 x 3,5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Taxter & Spengemann, New York.

'Do you love me?' is especially produced for the Kunstverein München. The 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?'” kunstverein-muenchen.de

Video: A documentary on occasion of Lutz Bacher's exhibition "Spill", 12 September 2008 until 4 January 2009 at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis contemporarystl.org.

This was the artist's first-ever solo exhibition in a major museum.

You can see the artist working on the hanging. The Contemporary presented her Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (1976), a selection of her infamous Jokes (1985-1988); her Playboys paintings (1991-93); appropriations of Gap ads (Gap, 2003-06), her Polaroids of plastic
trolls, Little People (2005); and Bien Hoa (2007), found photographs taken by an American soldier in Vietnam.

You will ask why the video shows so often the Budweiser cases. This work is inspired by Anheuser-Busch’s headquarters in St. Louis. Lutz Bacher filled a space with Budweiser cases to transform the quiet gallery into a place of excessive intoxication.


more culture>>>