In a career spanning more than forty years, Lutz Bacher created an extraordinarily heterogeneous body of work that resists any straightforward categorization.

The American artist, who operated under a male pseudonym from the beginning of her career, worked conceptually across a range of media. In photographs, sculptural arrangements, videos, sound works, and expansive installations, Bacher used images and objects embedded in collective memory and therefore readily recognizable: press photographs of public figures that acquire an aesthetic life of their own through repeated copying; found objects from second-hand shops, which she integrated into her installations as objets trouvés and second-hand readymades; or heavily worn baseballs, marbles, and sand.

For her appropriations, the artist drew on everyday and popular-cultural sources such as pulp novels, pornographic magazines, self-help literature, and paparazzi photographs; at times, she also established art-historical references. Not only the human body, sexuality, power, and violence play a central role in her work; a fundamental concern is also our present condition of existence and the deliberate blurring of private and public spheres.

This artist’s book, designed by Lutz Bacher, is published on the occasion of the exhibition More Than This, February 12–April 3, 2016, at the Secession.