Heidi Bucher
Small Portal (Sanatorium Bellevue, Kreuzlingen), 1988
Gaze, Fischleim und Latex Gauze, fish glue and latex
455 x 340 cm
Ablösen der Haut, Herrenzimmer, 1979
Three photographs by Hans Peter Siffert
75 x 50 cm; 44,5 x 30 cm; 30 x 44,3 cm; 44,2 x 30 cm
© The Estate of Heidi Bucher
Heidi Bucher im Libellenkostüm, Libellenlust, 1976
Photograph by Thomas Burla
20 x 27,8 cm
© The Estate of Heidi Bucher
Skinning of the Small Glass Portal (Sanatorium Bellevue, Kreuzlingen), 1988
Single-channel 16 mm film (colour)
8:57 min
Film by Michael Koechlin
Produced by German Television SWR (SWR feature Kulturszene, Häutungen)
© The Estate of Heidi Bucher
Courtesy The Estate of Heidi Bucher and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London
Heidi Bucher has intensively explored the relationship between space, matter and the traces of fleeting human life that are imprinted in physical matter. She developed a unique technique and working method known as Raumhäutung (spatial skinning): Bucher fixed gauze, a light and grid-like semi-transparent cotton fabric to walls with fish glue, coated the fabric with liquid latex and then pulled off the dried membranes with great physical effort. The resulting latex layer shows the relief of the room. At the same time, it also contains particles of the colours and patina that stuck to the latex when it was peeled off.
Bucher was interested in what was experienced in the spaces, what they symbolised and what power relations they produced. As an artist, she lived in a time of patriarchal structures, of the prevailing inequality of women—which was also dominant in the avant-garde art world—, and which she opposed with her free artistic way of life.
As Heidi Bucher herself says in the 1988 film by Michael Koechlin, which can be seen in the exhibition, she wants to reveal what is hidden—the feelings, memories and structures inscribed in the architecture. “Rooms are shells, they are skins. Peel off one skin after the other, discard it: the repressed, the neglected, the wasted, the lost, the sunken, the flattened, the desolate, the reversed, the diluted, the forgotten, the persecuted, the wounded”, (in: Ablösen des Kleinen Glasportals (Sanatorium Bellevue, Kreuzlingen), 1988, 8:02 min).
Her “skinnings” are sculptures in negative forms, but they can be read as symbolic acts of liberation from an old-fashioned and patriarchal world view.
Bucher began her Raumhäutungen in 1973 in her studio in Zurich, a former butcher’s shop with a cold store. She called this place Borg, from Geborgenheit, German for the feeling of security she felt there. She later turned her attention to her parents’ house in Winterthur: in particular the Herrenzimmer, a room that was reserved for wealthy bourgeois landlords and their male guests in the 19th century. The work which bears the same title became one of her most famous. She then created the skins in her grandparents’ ancestral home. In the years that followed, she worked in buildings steeped in history, such as the ruins of the Grande Albergo in Brissago, which served as a state internment camp during the Fascist era.
The work Kleines Glasportal (Sanatorium Bellevue, Kreuzlingen) is being shown at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. Heidi Bucher created it in 1988 in the Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen on Lake Constance. Bellevue was a private psychiatric sanatorium between 1857 and 1980. The Binswanger dynasty of psychiatrists practised here for many decades. The work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung also took its course here.
Bucher made a mould of the entrance area of the building. How many people entered through this portal and with what fate? Historical records report that artists and scientists such as the painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the actor and director Gustaf Gründgens and the cultural anthropologist Aby Warburg were also patients here. Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Binswanger carried out their first studies on hysterical patients in Bellevue. Hysteria was a condition that was once only attributed to female patients. In Bucher’s art, the psychiatric institution, a place of control and psychological intervention, becomes a symbol of power structures and externally determined body politics. Bucher exposes repressed and neglected layers that go hand in hand with the suppression and regulation of body and mind, especially of women.
The latex covers the wood-panelled walls as if the artist wanted to capture an invisible essence of the life that lived there, the feelings and destinies, the words spoken and ultimately the presence of absence.
Heidi Bucher’s work is a testimony to the complexity of human existence and the invisible, emotional traces that characterise our lives and our spaces. Her art invites us to look anew at the hidden and forgotten and offers a profound reflection on the visualisation of memory and emotion in space. The transformation of architecture through Bucher’s Häutungen is a poetic process that encompasses both the material and the immaterial and creates a special kind of presence through the fragility and aesthetics of her imprints.
The artist documented each of her “skinnings” on film or in photographs. This makes her physical exertion and the intensive creative process recognisable. After the removal, Bucher wrapped her own body in the “skins”, thus emphasising the intimate relationship between body, space and time. Like insects and reptiles that shed their skin again and again, what remains is an empty, hardened form of a liberated body. Bucher’s works can be read as a symbolic act of self-liberation, embodying emancipation from social and cultural constraints. The knowledge of how deeply her artistic actions and methods are embedded in her own life and experiences is still moving today.
Heidi Bucher (b. 1926, Winterthur, CH; d. 1993, Brunnen, CH) was a prominent Swiss artist, known for her unique textile works and latex sculptures. Bucher grew up as Adelheid Hildegard Müller in Wülflingen, CH. Her connection to fashion began during an apprenticeship as a dressmaker, followed by studies at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich from 1944 to 1947, where she focused on fashion design. She later lived and worked in the USA and Canada, where she collaborated with her husband Carl Bucher and encountered feminist positions of the Neo-Avant-Garde, which influenced her later work. In 1973, Bucher returned to Switzerland, settling in Zurich, where she started working on her latex sculptures. These explore the relationship between body, space, and memory through abstracted architectural forms. Bucher spent her last years on the Canary Islands. In Europe, her work was especially celebrated posthumously in numerous exhibitions. Among her most significant solo exhibitions were those held at the Kunstmuseum Bern (CH), Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (CN), Haus der Kunst, Munich (DE), Parasol Unit, London (GB), Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, New York (US), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (CH), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (US). Bucher’s works are part of major collections, including those of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur (CH), Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR), Museum of Modern Art, New York (US), Tate, London (GB), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (US), Kunsthaus Zürich (CH), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (US).
