Lutz Bacher: Burning the Days

Astrup Fearnley Museet and WIELS Brussels announce the first posthumous survey exhibition of American artist Lutz Bacher (1943–2019).

This landmark exhibition offers an expansive view of Bacher’s provocative, genre-defying oeuvre, spanning five decades of uncompromising art with an unsettling mix of affect and sentiment, humor, pop-cultural touchstones, and unflinching examinations of sexuality, violence, political paranoia, and cosmic metaphysics.

Lutz Bacher lived in Berkeley, California and later New York City. Early in her artistic life, she adopted a fictional, masculine-sounding pseudonym, insisting on an open-ended understanding of authorship and an identity that purposefully resisted categorization.

In the mid-1970s Bacher began making photographs. She took her own pictures, as well as transformed found photographs, amplifying their resonance by distorting, editing and combining them, or uncovering half-hidden details about them. Her method depended on chance, discovering what the world brought her by accident—an openness that later grew to include sculpture, video, and eventually museum-sized installations. She promoted the idea that artists can reckon with art and life through what the world has already made, permitting it to show her many sudden intrusions of beauty, comedy, or violence. This approach to art embraced the art-historical tradition of the ‘readymade,’ while also muddying its logic, using a wide range of found materials—texts, archival fragments, music, and objects—in wild relation.

As an artist, Lutz Bacher spent her life grappling with the political and psychic undertow of the last American century. A number of the subjects in Burning the Days are iconic American symbols: presidents, bison, widows, weapons, and would-be-assassins. Her art was animated from this violent outside, but much also emerged from questions inside, radiating a more intimate and existential register: Who might Lutz Bacher be? What might she do as an artist? What might her art mean right now, or later?

The exhibition title, Burning the Days, is Bacher’s own. It’s the title she gave to an unfinished book that now exists as a binder in her archive. The book is a chronological compilation of the artist’s work from 2013 until nearly the day she died in 2019. The title cites the expression used by soldiers during the Vietnam War to describe time spent off duty but still deployed: “burning the days.” The exhibition Lutz Bacher: Burning the Days, too, could be thought of as a draft, in that much like the book itself, it remains unfinished or unfinishable—a recollection of the past as well as a language to come. Rather than following a chronological order, it unfolds through a series of associative encounters—reflecting Bacher’s own attitude.

A comprehensive monograph will be published in 2026, featuring newly commissioned essays by art historian Kate Nesin, writer Emily LaBarge, and philosopher Juliane Rebentisch, alongside a curatorial foreword.

Curated by Solveig Øvstebø, with co-curators Helena Kritis and Dirk Snauwaert at WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art.

Lutz Bacher: Burning the Days is organized in collaboration with WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art, Brussels, where a new iteration of the exhibition will be on view from March 28–August 9, 2026.