“Into the Dimensional Corridor” is a phrase borrowed from a first season episode of the Star Trek series and refers to a magnetic corridor that allows travel between parallel universes, one of matter and one of anti-matter.
In the years leading up to the first installation of “Into the Dimensional Corridor”, Lutz Bacher slowly amassed sheets of Plexiglas from salvage stores throughout Brooklyn and Queens. As the number of sheets grew, she wrotein her notes: “So there was a sense that [this] was something to ‘follow’– wherever it might lead me – ”. As was often the trajectory of her later installations, she did not know where the path would lead or what other objects might finally come together.
By the time the material was shown at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen (2014) Bacher had transformed an implausible amount of scuffed Plexiglas into a room-sized abstraction, a horizontal composition that banded the gallery. Set inside the Plexiglas was a group of life–sized cutouts from Star Trek (Treks, 2006).Beneath each character was a summary of their own life, the life of an officer, a security chief, a conman, and a criminal who explore the numberless stars during times of war and peace. The installation also included digital projectors that played “standby blue”– the color a projector shows when the media is missing. This luminous hue,pretty but also purgatorial, was another accident of the studio – one the artist later stabilized into a recorded media file, “blue.mov.”
What did Bacher make of all this? She was indeterminate, perhaps even intangible on such points having almost nothing final to say about her art. Instead she was irreverently curious about what others might think, interviewing friends, asking them to articulate the piece back to her, as she did in a pamphlet made to accompany the exhibition in Copenhagen.
Now on view at Galerie Buchholz, the installation distorts as it reflects, outsourcing its possible meanings to us, and whatever we might bring into the corridor. Blue lights illuminate only to impair, technology goes dumb, characters appear dimensional then less so, shadows prevail, colored Plexiglas when layered makes new colors,venn diagrams, increased opacity. Here, leaning overlapped against the walls and spread across the floor, we are invited less to look through, as look into the material, finding in its reflective surface an alternate version of the installation’s other elements, the gallery space, as well as ourselves. What comes back are wonky distortions, lifelike illusions – a world of caricature much like our own.
This is Galerie Buchholz’s tenth solo exhibition of the work of the American artist Lutz Bacher (1943-2019). In September, The Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo will open “Burning the Days”, the first large-scale survey exhibition dedicated to the work of Lutz Bacher since the artist’s passing. Curated jointly by Solveig Øvstebø, Helena Kritis, and Dirk Snauwaert, the exhibition will travel to WIELS in Brussels in 2026 and will beaccompanied by a publication with new writing on the artist.
In 2023, Raven Row in London presented “AYE!”, a solo exhibition of Lutz Bacher curated by Anthony Huberman and devoted to the artist’s use of song and sound. In 2022, Treize in Paris presented “Do You LoveMe?”, a show featuring her seminal film of the same name together with found-object sculptures. In 2021, Lutz Bacher’s work was included in “Stop Painting” curated by Peter Fischli at Fondazione Prada, Venice; “Zeros and Ones” at KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin; “K20/K21 - On Display” at Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen, Düsseldorf; and “Exhibition as Image” at 80WSE in New York. In 2020, her work was included in “No Dandy, No Fun” at Kunsthalle Bern; and “Misfitting Together: Serial Formations of Pop Art, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art” at mumok in Vienna, among others. In 2019, the University of California Irvine presented a solo show by Bacher titled “Blue Wave” at the University Art Gallery, organized by the artist Monica Majoli and curatorAllyson Unzicker. Also in 2019, the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco presented show of new work by Vincent Fecteau featuring pieces by Bacher, his long-time friend and collaborator. In 2018, Lutz Bacher mounted three institutional solo exhibitions: “The Silence of the Sea”, the inaugural show at the new lyopened Lafayette Anticipations in Paris; “The Long March” at 80WSE New York University; and a large-scaleexhibition titled “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” at K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
Previous solo exhibitions by Lutz Bacher have been held at Yale Union, Portland; 356 Mission Road, Los Angeles;Secession, Vienna; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; Kunsthalle Zurich; ICA London; Portikus, Frankfurtam Main; Kunstverein Munich; and MoMA PS1, New York, among others. Her work was featured in “Everythingis Connected: Art and Conspiracy” at the Met Breuer, New York; “The Conditions of Being Art: Pat HearnGallery & American Fine Arts, Co. (1983-2004)” at Bard CCS and the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-OnHudson; “Other Mechanisms”, Secession, Vienna; “Stories of Almost Everyone”, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles;“Mechanisms”, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; “A Slow Succession with ManyInterruptions”, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; “America is Hard to See”, WhitneyMuseum of American Art, New York; “Open Dress”, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; “NYC 1993:Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star”, New Museum, New York; the 2012 Whitney Biennial, WhitneyMuseum of American Art, New York; and “Spies in the House of Art”, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lutz Bacher’s work is in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Museum of ModernArt, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; TheWhitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Art Institute of Chicago;Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo; K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; mumok, Vienna;Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Pinault Collection, Paris; and the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek.
