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).

Since the beginning of mankind, Homo sapiens have endeavoured to understand their relationship to the world as a structure of meanings. Where do we come from? How do we relate to the other living beings that inhabit the planet with us? How are we part of an infinite universe? Spiritual beliefs and myths, but also scientific observations and the resulting world views change over time and are an expression of how we humans interpret our relationship to the world.

We are increasingly exploring and penetrating the world. We decipher connections, we organise, quantify and name. We have created ever more complex instruments to do this. We find methods, formulate verifiable theorems and establish causalities between cause and effect. Researchers describe the world as it is, both physically and biologically. They use science to formulate terms and concepts and constantly achieve verifiable results. They decode the world and follow methodical procedures that open up immense possibilities for action. In this way, we make the world available to us. But science does not set itself the task of asking about the meaningfulness of life.

And what does art do? Art leads everything back to us. It asks about the meaning of knowledge for us. Artists are concerned with perception, or rather, with the nature of experience itself. How we perceive, visually, linguistically and aesthetically, but also how the experience of life takes place as an existential experience of “being in the world”. And art can transform our relationship with the world through narratives, through images and sounds, through poetry, into an experience of resonance.

Both science and art have their origins in intuition, imagination and conjecture. While scientists have to create evidence, artists can proceed more freely and make associations and imagination the material of their narratives. The meaning of existence and the experience of transcendence can hardly be found in science. We humans have to find them within ourselves. And we often create symbols to do so.

The Presence of Absence highlights matter as a presence into which life imprints itself. Energy and life are potent yet transient. The interplay between life, energy and matter is a central theme of the exhibition.

The exhibition will spatially juxtapose exhibits that translate the abstract concept of the “presence of absence” into an expanded realm of thought from both artistic and scientific perspectives. Works by significant contemporary artists will engage in dialogue with scientific exhibits from geology and astrophysics, including casts from Pompeii, footprints of prehistoric humans from the Laetoli site in present-day Tanzania and replicas of prehistoric cave paintings.

The curatorial narrative explores the astrophysical phenomenon of black holes. Concepts of expansion, time and the infinite cosmos challenge our understanding. Simultaneously, they provoke questions about our identity and origins. Our planet hovers somewhere between the boundless and the eternal. For a fleeting moment, the window of our lives opens, revealing the unique experience of our existence through our bodies, senses and minds. Each exhibit, in its own distinct way, engages with this existential exploration of being and humanity across the dimensions of space and time.

With this exhibition, we also trace the origins of art as a fundamental human desire to express abstract ideas. Why did Homo sapiens, tens of thousands of years ago, carve animal figures and abstract geometric shapes into the walls of deep caves? Why did they create images of things that were understood by others as symbols, serving as a connection to higher, non-manifest, spiritual realms? Why did Homo sapiens, unlike other species, develop a need for transcendence?

One of the countless stories and myths that moved us is recorded by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, written around 77 years AD, shortly before he met his death in the fiery ash rain of Pompeii: the myth of Butades of Sicyon, the Corinthian potter, and his daughter. The story goes like this: the young girl loved a young man who had to leave for a long journey. As the separation approached, the girl drew the outline of her lover’s head against the wall where the light of the fire fell. The father, moved by her plight, filled in this shadow image with colour and made a clay imprint of the outline, which he then fired. According to Pliny’s myth, art arises from the desire to capture the transient and fleeting; to preserve it out of wistfulness and longing, absence and memory, but also out of love and through beauty. This parable is touching because it embodies such fundamental feelings.

The outline, the stone wall and the fire—doesn’t this remind you of the earliest cave paintings and engravings found by palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists on every continent? Were these the origin of art at the dawn of humanity?

The oldest evidence is attributed to the Blombos Cave in South Africa, dating back 140,000 years. With the migrations of Homo sapiens, cave art spread across every continent. Despite such incredibly extended time periods, this early art exhibits similar techniques and motifs. These seem to have been passed down from group to group, from generation to generation, long before the physiological evolution of the larynx and brain suggested the emergence of language and writing.

For tens of thousands of years, humans—early artists—created images of animals, human figures and abstract signs. Did they grapple with the same questions and ideas that modern humans do?

The cave paintings of the San people in South Africa and Botswana, or those from the Magdalenian culture of the Stone Age in Europe, served as a readable visual language for early humans. They depicted the experienced environment while also representing the spiritual cosmos of these ancient people. The stone walls, where humans created their paintings, far from the outside world and deep in the darkness of the earth, were more than just canvases. They were like a skin that separated this world from the other. Negative forms and imprints of human hands have been found in caves on every continent. These suggest the magic of contact, the touch of a hand on the surface of the rock as a gateway to another world. Leaving a handprint may have been part of a sacred act of connection with an invisible beyond—a transcendental experience. It is evidence of the primordial human need and eternal quest for a deeper relationship with a reality beyond the individual.

Awe in the face of nature. The feeling that there is more than we know. The striving to understand, to perceive through both our senses and our minds the eternal structures that reveal the order of everything in this universe and ourselves as part of it.

Since the dawn of humanity, people have gazed at the night sky. “Mathematics is the language in which the book of the universe is written”, said Galileo Galilei. It is a way of assigning meaning to symbols that can then be read and understood by others. Mathematics is a universal language of human thought, and mathematical rules reflect the order found in all natural processes, whether it’s the Fibonacci sequence or Einstein’s equations. This makes mathematics the purest form of expressing universal principles. Music follows precise mathematical structures, the growth of plants, the sequence of tides and every form of existence can be described by mathematical equations. Yet, there remains so much that humanity does not yet understand. Time and again, the power of the human mind will strive to push these boundaries.

What is the origin of all matter on earth and in the infinity of the cosmos? What effects do natural events create that reshape the earth and affect people’s lives with their power? And how do people deal with the existential need to face eternity in their finiteness? What myths and images do they create in order to connect with the spiritual? Is art a way of immortalising oneself in time? The exhibition is dedicated to these questions, which have been driving the human imagination from prehistoric times to the present day. Ever since we humans have existed on earth, we have created stories, symbols and signs to give form to our feelings, thoughts and knowledge, to leave traces in time and perhaps to connect with eternity.

We experience the miracle of reality through the senses of our body. This consists of the elements of exploding stars in space: the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood and the carbon in our cells. In fleeting moments, we connect with eternity and give traces of existence a material form. Art is one way of doing this.

I would like to thank Claudio Parmiggiani, Indigo and Mayo Bucher, the sons of Heidi Bucher, Toni R. Toivonen, Petra Noordkamp, the artists of the Marshmallow Laser Feast collective and Lawrence Malstaf, as well as the institutional lenders, Dr Gabriel Zuchtriegel and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Prof Dr Fabio Martini and Dr Lapo Baglioni of the Florentine Museum and Institute of Prehistory “Paolo Graziosi”, the Natural History Museum Vienna, the LWL-Museum of Natural History in Münster, Nicolò Stabile, founder of the initiative Il Cretto è casa mia of the survivors of the earthquake in the town of Gibellina, as well as the photographer Giuseppe Ippolito, the VR creator Alberto Stabile and the writer Giovanna Giordano. I would like to thank the Italian Consulate General for its patronage. I would especially like to thank Prof Dr Andreas Mulch, Director of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, and Prof Dr Luciano Rezzolla from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt for a time of joint thinking and working.

Franziska Nori
Director Frankfurter Kunstverein