A major retrospective of the elusive American conceptual artist Lutz Bacher, titled 'Burning the Days,' has opened at Wiels in Brussels. The exhibition spans Bacher's decades-long practice of using found images, pop culture artifacts, and historical figures like Lee Harvey Oswald to create works that resist easy interpretation. Curator Helena Kritis emphasizes that the show deliberately avoids solving the mystery of Bacher's identity, instead focusing on themes of instability, complicity, and the seductive yet distorting power of images. Key works include 'The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview' (1976-78), a performance piece where Bacher plays both interviewer and assassin, and 'Men at War' (1975), which juxtaposes American soldiers with a swastika tattoo to provoke shock and reflection.
This retrospective matters because Lutz Bacher, who worked under a pseudonym and rarely appeared publicly, represents a radical and influential voice in American conceptual art that challenges conventional notions of authorship, identity, and the viewer's role. By refusing to provide clarity or moral certainty, Bacher's work forces audiences to confront their own complicity in consuming imagery and the myths of American culture. The exhibition at Wiels, a leading contemporary art center in Europe, brings renewed attention to an artist whose practice—spanning the 1970s to the 2010s—remains urgently relevant in an age of information overload and manipulated media.