BACHER, Lutz; KRITIS, Helena (ed.); ØVSTEBØ, Solveig (ed.)
Lutz Bacher: Burning the Days

This catalogue – the first posthumous publication on Lutz Bacher –  brings together three newly commissioned essays, installation views of the survey exhibitions Lutz Bacher: Burning the Days presented at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, in 2025, and at WIELS, Brussels, 2026, and reproductions of some of the artist’s works – including extensive documentation of the different parts of the works Jackie & Me (1989), The Lee Oswald Interview (1976-78), Bien Hoa (2006/2016).

In her text, Kate Nesin takes The Betty Center — Bacher’s archive of nearly 300 black binders, later realised as an artwork — as a point of departure to examine her engagement with archives, containers, and readymade forms. Juliane Rebentisch reads Bacher’s work as a sustained practice of opacity that stages accumulation, self-exposure, humour, and citation to unsettle fixed identities and disrupt the clichés through which meaning is usually secured. Finally, Emily LaBarge reads Bacher through the logic of the pun, showing how her works hinge on double meanings and perceptual slippages that make uncertainty the condition of viewing.

[publishers’ note]

Published by ROMA Publications / WIELS / Astrup Fearnley Museum, 2026
Design by Julie Peeters
Exhibition Catalogues