We are pleased to present a new exhibition by Lutz Bacher entitled Open the Kimono. This is Lutz Bacher's fifth solo exhibition with Galerie Buchholz, and her second at our Cologne space.
The central series on view at the gallery will be a 14-part photographic work titled Swingers in which the artist has rephotographed personal advertisements from the back pages of a vintage adult magazine. The pages include self-made photographs showing the subjects of these personal advertisements (pre-digital 'selfies') with descriptions of individuals and couples advertising themselves for 'swingers,' or additional participants for sexual adventures. Since the 1970s, Lutz Bacher has been working with text-and-image combinations that explore psychological, social or political meanings that seem to hide in plain sight within the found objects and images that she appropriates. The images show bodies with their faces obscured, hiding the identity of the 'swingers' while publicly advertising their private, intimate desires. These personal ads are from a time before general internet usage, before social media, and before online dating or online pornography, but in them one can already prefigure some of the psychological and social impulses that figure so heavily in our current reality of media and politics. In tandem with Swingers, Lutz Bacher also presents a series called the Hair Drawings, made by the artist in 2010 and also shown here for the first time. These drawings in black ink on paper are installed on two walls that have been painted with a primer coat of black paint. These drawings show various configurations of lines, hinting at strands of hair around an anthropomorphic form but never showing a figure.
In the window of Antiquariat Buchholz, Lutz Bacher will present a new video slideshow Open the Kimono, along with the original hand-written manuscript of her newly published book of the same name. The book and the slideshow each reproduce pages with the artist's notes, quoting from the news, tv dramas, advertisements, overheard conversations–quick phrases pulled from the onslaught of contemporary noise and treated as 'lessons' or proverbs.
Lutz Bacher is an American artist living and working in New York City. Concurrent with this exhibition, she will have a solo museum show at K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen in Düsseldorf titled What's Love Got To Do With It (6 September 2018–6 January 2019). Her work will be included in an upcoming group exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York titled Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy, opening on September 17, 2018.
On view at 80WSE, the gallery at New York University, is her solo exhibition The Long March, through September 8, 2018. Her work is also currently included in Site Sante Fe's biennial SITElines 2018: Casa Tomada, through January 6, 2019. Earlier this year Lutz Bacher's work was the subject of the inaugural solo exhibition at Fondation d'enterprise Galeries Lafayette in Paris, titled The Silence of the Sea; and her work was included in Other Mechanisms, a group show at Secession, Vienna. Recent solo exhibitions include Sweet Jesus, KADIST, San Francisco (2017); The Secret Garden, Yale Union, Portland (2016); More Than This, Secession, Vienna (2016); Into the Dimensional Corridor at SMK National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2014-2015), Snow at Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich (2013); Black Beauty, ICA London (2013); and Portikus, Frankfurt-am-Main (2013), among others. Her work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley.
Press release courtesy Galerie Buchholz.
Neven-DuMont-Str. 17
Cologne, 50667
Germany
www.galeriebuchholz.de
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