The enigmatic artist who captured the comedy and violence of American life

No one knows Lutz Bacher’s real name, even to this day. Living and working between California and New York throughout her life, the artist adopted the masculine pseudonym early in her career and continued to use it until her death in 2019. It makes sense, though. Bacher’s work – which spans a variety of media, from photography, to found objects, produced across several decades – is open-ended, eclectic, impossible to categorise, and frequently plays around with ideas of authorship and appropriation. Why not make her personal identity similarly difficult to pin down?

This isn’t to say that Bacher was completely absent from her work. Take, for example, Do You Love Me? (1994), a 12-hour film in which she interviews friends, family, artists, and colleagues on the topic of the “artist and person” Lutz Bacher, which is currently streaming on a continuous loop via the Astrup Fearnley museum. In theory, the film is all about Bacher, but even here she ends up revealing more about the people she interviews, via their voices, opinions, and the intimate admissions they make in front of the camera.

The Do You Love Me? stream is part of a landmark exhibition at the Oslo museum, titled Lutz Bacher: Burning the Days, which constitutes the first posthumous survey of her career. Across 10 sprawling gallery rooms, large-scale photographs of a deserted highway sit alongside scattered stress balls, mannequins, a giant chess set featuring Elvis in a gold lamé suit, and an electric organ played by randomised wooden hammers (we told you it’s eclectic). Elsewhere, a cabinet of slogan t-shirts bear phrases from a personality test that Bacher was asked to take in the lead-up to an operation that removed noncancerous tumours from her uterus.

Other works on display don’t appear to have much to do with Bacher at all. In Jackie & Me (1989), a series of appropriated paparazzi shots show the photographer, Ron Galella, attempting to chase down a woman we’re supposed to believe is Jackie O. “Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the most desirable woman in the world wanted to be chased by me, Ron Galella, the paparazzo,” reads the caption under one image, striking a tone that’s both menacing and comically absurd. Anyway, it turns out he’s too unfit to keep up, and in later photographs the woman recedes into the distance.

The Kennedy intrigue begins more than a decade earlier, in The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (1976). In this series of cut-and-paste images with text, Bacher ‘interviews’ herself on the subject of President Kennedy’s killer, leaning into the conspiracies that surrounded the assassination with photocopies of men who may or may not be Oswald. Under one newspaper headshot – not of Oswald but of an “escaped psychopath” – she questions the authenticity of images themselves, saying: “I used to look at this picture and try to decide if he looked like a psychopath even though I already knew because I’d been told. I decided there was no way of telling that kind of thing from a photograph.”

Toward the end of the exhibition, Bacher’s unusual sense of humour – which is noticeable after watching just a few minutes of Do You Love Me? – is really allowed to shine via a rare reunion of her series Jokes (1985-88) and Playboys (1991-93). In the former, she edits fragments of old photographs with speech bubbles holding raunchy puns and dark castration jokes. In the latter, she appropriates erotic artworks and blows up their original, ridiculous captions to raise some disconcerting questions about the psychosexual undercurrents of American culture. “Sure, I’m for the feminist movement,” reads one text, attached to an illustration of a blonde haired, blue-eyed nude model. “In fact, I’m pretty good at it.”

Created in the year of her death, the artist’s final work was Firearms (2019). Blown up to fill a whole wall at the museum, its 58 prints depict different models of guns taken from pages of a manual on gun maintenance, lovingly rendered and often including snippets of trivia. This bookends Bacher’s career alongside Men at War (1975), which sees a single found negative printed across nine large-scale pages, each cropped differently to emphasise different parts of the full image. Without reading the title, some of the fragments seem to show a group of friends enjoying a sunny trip to the beach (or “burning the days” between battles), until you spot the swastika scrawled on one man’s chest.

Taken together, these two artworks from the extremes of her career seem to point to a similar thing: under the humour, iconography, and fetishism of American culture lies a dark heart of violence and horror. In 2025, this might not feel like such a shocking revelation, but it seems wise to remind ourselves that it’s been this way for a long time, and probably isn’t going to change too drastically any time soon.

Lutz Bacher: Burning the Days is on show at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, until January 4, 2026.