Michael Bacht


Michael Bacht is a German artist.

Biography

Bacht was born in Remscheid and attended the Burg-Gymnasium, the Carl-Humann-Gymnasium and the Folkwang School for Fine Art in Essen, where from the age of sixteen he studied figurative and nude drawing under the tutelage of Jo Pieper. From 1969 to 1971, upon his recognition as a conscientious objector, he studied art history with Günter Bandmann and philosophy with Ernst Bloch and Dieter Jähnig at the University of Tübingen. A decisive influence at that time was also the close friendship with Karl Ameriks, an expert of German idealism.
In 1972, Bacht continued his studies at the University of Heidelberg. His main interests there were European as well as East Asian fine art and architecture, and his key academic teachers were Peter Anselm Riedl and Dietrich Seckel. His formative encounter with Fritz Wotruba, whose work he cataloged as a doctoral student, also occurred during this period and incited him to pursue studies in fine art at the University of Mainz from 1974 to 1979.
In 1973, Bacht married the judge Brigitte Holzinger from Freiburg, with whom he raised five children.
Since 1979, Bacht has been working as a freelance fine artist with studios in Heidelberg, the former cigar factory Malsch and, after a conversion that took one year to complete, in the former catholic village church of Epfenbach.

Work

Bacht's aim as an artist is the visualisation of dialectical processes between artistic material and aesthetic design principles that always unfold as respectful mimeses of cyclic laws of nature. „The wave“, writes Hans Gercke, „fascinates him in its polarity of height and depth, light and shade, concave and convex movement, serenity and dynamic“. Such elementary experiences, the rhythm that all organic life depends on, the pulse of our bloodstream, the tides, day and night, the seasons, the law of tension and release, are objectified in all work groups and lend aesthetic unity to Bacht's work.
Early work groups, developed from 1975 to 1985, are the embossed prints, followed from 1985 to 1990 by anode pictures. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Bacht created major works like „Shrine for a Stone“ with several variations, the series of book objects, earth circles and makimono pictures as well as his first large-scale floor installations. In 1995, Bacht introduced light as a design instrument. From 2000, a series of critical homages to key figures of classical modernism and the White Installations were added to the canon of work groups. Another work group is dedicated to objects and architectonic structures for an alternative sepulchral culture.
All work groups are flanked by an encyclopaedia of satirical objects, assembled under the group title „Kein Wunder“.

Solo exhibitions