Lutz Bacher's 'Black Beauty' exhibition explores cultural readymades and dreamlike installations

Lutz Bacher's exhibition 'Black Beauty' features installations that blend cultural references and found objects to create unsettling yet familiar environments. The show includes works like 'Horse/Shadow' (2010–12), a painted wooden cartoon horse rotating under spotlights, accompanied by Elvis Presley's 'Blue Moon' from 2009. In another room, 'Chess' (2012) presents an oversized game with a cardboard Elvis, a camel prop, a tyrannosaur sculpture photo, and chess pieces facing a replica of Marcel Duchamp's 'Bicycle Wheel' (1913). Downstairs, 'Black Magic' (2013) uses astroturf with vibrating phone motors, while 'Black Beauty' (2012) covers the gallery floor in black silicate sand. 'Ashtray' (2013) is a welded junk sculpture, and 'Puck' (2012) features audio of a man reciting lines from Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. Bacher's work employs stage props, ephemera, and tropes to evoke themes of dreams and space, drawing on characters like Elvis as proxies for broader ideas. The exhibition was reviewed in ArtReview's December 2013 issue, highlighting its personal, scrappy aesthetic and use of cultural readymades. Bacher's practice references artists like Duchamp and theorists such as Rosalind Krauss, exploring speculative time and kitsch sublime through arranged objects.