Bacher’s career is marked by restrained yet comprehensive interventions into exhibition frameworks, highlighting her particular pairing of work and context. For P.S.1, works from the mid 1970s to the present are organized according to the sequential layout of the Second Floor Main Gallery, with its central hall as the installation’s frenetic epicenter. This exhibition is on view from February 22 through September 14, 2009.

Navigating from still to moving, spatial to flat, and silent to loud, the exhibition emphasizes Bacher’s positioning of the image, which, although persistent in its mirroring and shaping of experience, is also consistently engaged in a process of imminent breakdown. A deliberate subversion of apparent signature style is also related to the unstable status of the image that Bacher insinuates through works in photography, painting, drawing, and video.

Early works in still photography and its various reproduction methods, such as The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (1976) and Jackie and Me (1989), delineate a constellation of concerns involving gender, sexuality, violence, and power. The intersection of Bacher’s two-dimensional work with time-based projects such as Olympiad (1997), Closed Circuit (1997-2000), and Manhatta (1999), further reveals that in Bacher’s work, the processes of illumination and obliteration (of image, of subject, of author) are consistent, perhaps cumulative across mediums and timeframes.

The accompanying publication SMOKE (Gets In Your Eyes), was published by Regency Arts Press and produced as a companion to both P.S.1’s MY SECRET LIFE and Lutz Bacher: Spill at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Lutz Bacher has lived and worked in Berkeley, California since the 1970s. The artist thanks the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Participant, INC, New York.

Lutz Bacher MY SECRET LIFE is organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center Curatorial Advisor Lia Gangitano.

Special thanks to Taxter & Spengemann, New York.