Lutz Bacher and the Power of Omission

‘What about me bugs you?’ asks Lutz Bacher in Do You Love Me? (1994), her 12-hour epic of interviews with friends, family, fellow artists and arts professionals. The question unsettles her interlocutors, who face the camera while Bacher remains off-screen, alternately laughing with and wheedling them for answers. Their mental arithmetic is plain: how serious is the question? Can it be answered? Should it? Their pauses guide the work – indeed, pausing predicates Bacher’s art.

Tellingly, the film – arguably the most biographical in the artist’s oeuvre – does not appear in the galleries of ‘Burning the Days’, her first posthumous museum retrospective, nimbly curated by Solveig Øvstebø, Dirk Snauwaert and Helena Kritis. Instead, the curators of the show – which opened at the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, and will travel to WIELS, Brussels, in spring 2026 – screen Do You Love Me? on the museum’s website, looping it continuously so visitors can drop in to glean stray biographical details (from studio visits or quotidian meetings) or linger until the accumulated elements prove more obfuscating than enlightening (identical questions rarely receive identical answers).

The decision not to give the work a physical space continues the felicitous choice of avoiding major biographical beats for ‘a series of associative encounters’, as the gallery guide puts it – a curatorial approach dating back to Bacher’s first museum survey, at MoMA PS1, New York, in 2009. If ‘Burning the Days’ eschews the more anodyne models of career retrospectives – tracing chronological, geographical or professional shifts – its thresholds nevertheless point to the institutionalizing act of the museum itself, even by negation. On the outdoor terrace, for instance, one can hear Sweet Jesus (2016), a recitation of the paternal lineage of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew, read by the late actor James Earl Jones, whose baritone Bacher slows and repeats, producing a dirge. This attenuation, however, is more museal than funerary.

Similarly, Closed Circuit (1997–2000) plays on a screen in the museum’s entrance, almost as an antithesis to Do You Love Me? Rather than a half-day of footage, the film is a tight 40 minutes of stills from a surveillance camera trained on Pat Hearn, Bacher’s dealer and a key figure in the 1990s downtown New York art scene. Like Do You Love Me?, it provokes questions about legacy, memory and loss (Hearn died from cancer aged only 45 in 2000) – obliquely, maybe, but in a manner that asks: once all the days are burned – the title a reference to both an unfinished notebook in the artist’s archive and an idiom for the bored fatalism of off-duty days spent during military deployment – who or what holds that ash?

Bacher asked this herself, of course. Her work often started from the tailings of American mass culture – everything from outdated photo books to unused foam seats – revealing in the bric-a-brac its psychological and social questions. For instance, stepping down into the first gallery one discovers various objects: Snow White (2009), two film canisters with overlapping red and green labels typewritten with the name of the 1937 Disney classic; The Road (2007), a group of eleven found images of a curving roadway, printed on aluminium; and Smoke (1976), the only photographic self-portrait of the artist in the show. Each is like ‘opening a gift made of metal’, to quote another friend from Do You Love Me? They are conceptually alloyed but generous in form – like a blunt question asked sincerely.

‘Burning the Days’ is an archive of these little inquisitions, gifted freely though often hard to receive. Plenty will make the viewer pause and leave them uncomfortable. Still, Bacher knew the best questions were the ones that bugged you most.

Lutz Bacher’s ‘Burning the Days’ is on view at the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, until 4 January 2026

_{Main image: Lutz Bacher, ‘Burning the Days’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: © Astrup Fearnley Museet; photograph: Christian Øen}