Lutz Bacher: More Than This / Dike Blair: Floors/Doors/Windows/Walls.

Lutz Bacher
More Than This

In a career spanning more than four decades, Lutz Bacher has built a highly heterogeneous oeuvre that defies classification. The American artist, who adopted her male pseudonym when she first started out, has produced conceptual work in a variety of media. Bacher’s photographs, sculptural arrangements, videos, sound pieces, and expansive installations incorporate images and objects that are fixed in collective memory and easily retrieved: press photographs of public figures that, copied several times over, begin to lead a strangely aesthetic new life, found objects from thrift shops she integrates into her installations as objets trouvés and readymades. Her appropriations draw on vernacular and pop culture sources such as dime novels, porn magazines, self-help literature, and paparazzi snapshots. The human body, sexuality, power, and violence are key issues in her art, as is the deliberate blurring of the line separating the private from the public sphere.

Through abstraction, fragmentation, and the arrangement of things in unwonted orders, Bacher raises questions concerning the standardizing pressures that shape social models of identity and our individual life choices, confronting our preference for conformity with piles of sand, coal slag, or thousands of loose marbles in the exhibition space to create situations of literal as well as metaphorical instability: everything, we sense, may change in an instant.

More Than This, Lutz Bacher’s new installation in the Secession’s main hall will bring together a loose arrangement of found objects—large, bulky tubes that are at the same time reminiscent of broken tools and parts of giant (toy) creatures—painting, and a sound piece into which the space and its visitors are immersed. With a short video clip that opens up a dialogue with Gutstav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, the installation continues in the room where this main work of Klimt is on permanent presentation.

Lutz Bacher’s artist’s book The Gift will be published in conjunction with the show.

Lutz Bacher lives and works in New York.

Curator: Jeanette Pacher
 

Dike Blair
Floors/Doors/Windows/Walls.

The central object of Dike Blair’s oeuvre, which he has pursued since the early 1980s in gouaches, is a contemporary interpretation of the landscape and the still life. Since the 1990s, he has also created sculptures, often in dialogue with his paintings, but unlike the latter, they translate his ongoing engagement with questions of form into abstract designs.

The series of works he presents at the Secession capture seemingly arbitrary segments of domestic settings such as a piece of floor, a cropped section of a door, or a part of a window in peculiarly off-kilter frames. The pictures look like inadvertent photographic snapshots but are in fact the results of deliberate and careful composition.

Dike Blair often presents his pictures in thematic pairs and in interaction with sculptures, arrangements that bring out formal aspects and contrasting principles of order. The alternation of opulence and emptiness, nature and architecture, interior and exterior, center and periphery reflects the dualism that underlies the artist’s thinking and creative approach and lets him confront a dilemma of artistic production: to make any formal choice is to discard a viable alternative that would yield a completely different result. Hence the frequent appearance in his oeuvre of pairs of sculptures that represent two versions.

Blair’s exhibition at the Secession will feature a selection of around fifty paintings as well as a new series of sculptures he plans on realizing in Vienna.

The artist’s book Drinks will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.

Dike Blair was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1952. He lives and works in New York.

Curator: Bettina Spörr
 

Press
Press conference: February 11, 10am
For interview requests and any other questions please contact: katharina.schniebs@secession.at
Please find the press releases and images for download here from February 11, 2016.