In 1976, when Lutz Bacher was asked to be interviewed about her art, she chose to talk about Lee Harvey Oswald. Naturally, the interviewer asked why, and whether the assassination fascinated the artist. After all, Americana runs through her work. “It’s not like that at all,” she replied.
I read this interview, which was cut and collaged together from photos of Oswald’s face from his eighteen-part body of work Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (1976-78). The work opens the first posthumous retrospective of the elusive artist at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo. Appropriately, it hangs near the play’s only self-portrait: a film showing Bach sitting, smoking, and drinking milk, printed so small that you can barely see her face.
Why did Oswald become her stand-in? Her answer was not about him, but about photography. She began the interview by describing seeing a man’s face in a newspaper with the words “Escaped Psychopath.” She looked closely at the photo, asking herself if he really looked mentally ill, and then challenged herself to try to see him as a human being. Next, she did the same thing to LHO: she looked at him, trying to see if he actually killed JFK. “Really?” like most people, the interviewer wants to know. She replied that what she meant was, “I don’t know.” All she had were pictures and people’s comments about them, which was not enough to express understanding.
Landscape from Lutz Bacher’s 2025 exhibition “Burning the Days” at Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo.
Photo: Christian Erns. Courtesy of Lutz Bacher Estate, Galerie Buchholz and Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
I think her point is less about conspiracy theories than it is about something broader: how images and narratives work together or not to make meaning; if someone tells you a picture shows XYZ, it’s hard not to see it even if the picture has little evidence of it; how language can prevent viewing.
As a proof of concept, the artist offers fans of her work little in terms of narrative. Lutz Bacher isn’t even her real name. She used a pseudonym that led people to mistake her for a German man, perhaps indirectly associating herself with German joke groups such as Martin Kippenberger or Fischli & Weiss. In fact, she was a woman from San Francisco who lived from 1943 to 2019. Her real name has never been revealed, although her husband, a Berkeley astrophysicist, calls her “Susan.”
A deft tension between showing and telling structures this investigation. The walls of one room are covered with pictures of celestial bodies taken through telescopes and cut out of books. On the floor, a cluster of black rubber balls undercut the cosmic sublimity. While contemplating these feats of physics and photography, you have to be careful not to stumble, and even more aware of your own clumsiness in comparison. However, a sense of awe is out of reach because the images are printed so small and poorly that they are difficult to actually see.
Lutz Bacher: Jackie and me (detail), 1989.
Courtesy of Lutz Bacher Estate, Galerie Buchholz and Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
nearby, in Jackie and me (1989), images and captions of a paparazzi named Ron Galella tell a Sophie Carr-style story about an attempt to photograph Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Jackie ran; Galera, smug, thought she was playing along. But the joke was on him: she was in much better shape and had an easy escape. The photos only show the back of a woman’s head, but we are asked to believe his story, which is steeped in male fantasy. “The most desirable woman in the world wants to be chased by me,” he declared. as if.
These are the found photos, there is one other photo that also stands out: man in war (1975), Bach discovered the negative by printing a photograph on nine different crops of paper. It shows white soldiers relaxing on a beach, possibly before killing or being killed. A man has a swastika-shaped scar on his chest, the pale incision glowing white against his dark brown skin. who are they? What does this all mean? Bach sidesteps context and asks the question: How can we make use of images in the absence of information?
Landscape from Lutz Bacher’s 2025 exhibition “Burning the Days” at Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo.
Photo: Christian Ernes. Courtesy of Lutz Bacher Estate, Galerie Buchholz and Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
man in warThe show’s title, “The Burning Years,” comes from Bach’s unfinished book and from the slang used by American soldiers to describe being off duty but still deployed in Vietnam. The exhibition highlights her technique for erasing the boundaries between sculpture and painting. The life-size chessboard features flat and 3D game pieces – cardboard Elvis, a full-size replica of Duchamp’s chess pieces. bike wheelbisecting the semicircle of rooks and chess pieces. The board looks more pixelated than checkered. Elsewhere, satellite images of the world are printed on plastic and inflated like beach balls. Where does the image end and the world begin?
Like most of her images and titles, all of these objects are found objects. Yet every discovery in the play feels entirely hers: the unprecious is handled with rigorous intelligence and care. It’s easy to think of her work as depressing, but look closer and you’ll find warmth and humor. After all, the centerpiece is a flat-painted pony wearing a birthday hat, dramatically illuminated and spinning on a stick.
Walking around, you’ll notice a little violence here, a little humor there, a little tenderness in the next room. This is true of both art and life—that is, sometimes all three at once. Nothing is single, tender moments come from all over the place, a catalog of guns. An enlarged and framed fifty-eight page excerpt presents wistful descriptions of large weapons and how to hold and care for them. She died suddenly of a heart attack the day before finishing the job.
Do her works give us too little or too much meaning? The final gallery dances around the cash register. Like all the other rooms, it is arranged relationally rather than chronologically—always mixing and pairings to produce new readings, as Bach did throughout his life. The final scene shows 24-inch Polaroids of Troll dolls (one with a weird belly button) as well as proper airbrushed versions playboy Watercolors, their original silly title emphasizes: Of course, I support the feminist movement said a ventriloquist blonde. In fact, I’m really good at it.
She also joins the ranks of trolls and topless girls with her “Jokes” (1985-88) series, drawn from a humor book with speech bubbles for celebrities. Bach crumpled and smudged the pages and re-photographed them. These original memes, like playboy The title, not particularly interesting: Photos of Jane Fonda Just Says I was really weird and messed up. If there’s one thing to take away, it’s that explaining a joke ruins the mood. Bach seemed to think the same was true of art: it’s better to be curious about the weird than to understand information at the expense of experience.
Her captioned image differs from a meme, and from a lot of concept art, in that you can’t just Google its meaning. Long before the information age made our intelligence so artificial, Bach showed us that summaries are not only dubious: they also deprive us of the opportunity to truly observe. She’s now showing us how wonderful and weird it can look if we’re willing to leave a little room for ambiguity.
