Born of a middle-class Winterthur family, Heidi Bucher studied at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts under Johannes Itten and Max Bill. She started her career in Zurich as an illustrator for Tages-Anzeiger, and began exhibiting her drawings in the 1950s. She and her family lived abroad from 1969 to 1973, first in Canada and then in Los Angeles, where she exhibited several times with her husband, Carl Bucher. As part of one of their collaborations, she produced oversized, futuristic sculpture-garments made of foam plastic (Bodyshells), which she brought to life in performances.
The couple separated upon their return to Zurich in 1974, and then Heidi Bucher began developing a personal, singular artistic approach involving skinnings (Häutungen), which she continued for the rest of her life. The experiment began on the walls of her studio in a former butcher’s, to which she applied liquid mother-of-pearl latex and gauze in order to achieve a skin-like texture that, once dried, enabled her to “undress” the architecture. The resulting skin had been given enough time to get marked in detail by the edges and mouldings of the wall or façade. Whitewashing whole rooms may have been a painter’s gesture, but freeing them of that coat was more the stuff of performance, considering the strength required to succeed, and the sometimes-large size of the places involved. Some sites were connected with a personal memory (her childhood home or that of her grandparents), others with a collective one (the Grand Hotel Brissago).
The final step in the work: Heidi Bucher installed those monumental sheets of latex on walls or in space, to produce supple life-sized reproductions of architecture. In this way, she made them into markers of a rite of passage, a metamorphosis, between memory and filiation, as if freeing stories enclosed within walls: “Spaces are shells, skins. Peeling off one skin after another, discarding: the repressed, the neglected, the wasted, the failed, the engulfed, the flattened, the desolate, the perverted, the watered-down, the forgotten, the haunted, the wounded ”, she explained.
The avant-garde work of this artist active on the seventies’ feminist art scene took a long time to gain its rightful recognition. The first solo exhibition paying tribute to her work after her death was in 2004, a the Migros Museum in Zurich.
The couple separated upon their return to Zurich in 1974, and then Heidi Bucher began developing a personal, singular artistic approach involving skinnings (Häutungen), which she continued for the rest of her life. The experiment began on the walls of her studio in a former butcher’s, to which she applied liquid mother-of-pearl latex and gauze in order to achieve a skin-like texture that, once dried, enabled her to “undress” the architecture. The resulting skin had been given enough time to get marked in detail by the edges and mouldings of the wall or façade. Whitewashing whole rooms may have been a painter’s gesture, but freeing them of that coat was more the stuff of performance, considering the strength required to succeed, and the sometimes-large size of the places involved. Some sites were connected with a personal memory (her childhood home or that of her grandparents), others with a collective one (the Grand Hotel Brissago).
The final step in the work: Heidi Bucher installed those monumental sheets of latex on walls or in space, to produce supple life-sized reproductions of architecture. In this way, she made them into markers of a rite of passage, a metamorphosis, between memory and filiation, as if freeing stories enclosed within walls: “Spaces are shells, skins. Peeling off one skin after another, discarding: the repressed, the neglected, the wasted, the failed, the engulfed, the flattened, the desolate, the perverted, the watered-down, the forgotten, the haunted, the wounded ”, she explained.
The avant-garde work of this artist active on the seventies’ feminist art scene took a long time to gain its rightful recognition. The first solo exhibition paying tribute to her work after her death was in 2004, a the Migros Museum in Zurich.