Heidi Bucher

Swiss Institute is delighted to
present the first exhibition by Swiss artist Heidi Bucher (1926-1993) at
an American institution in more than 40 years. The exhibition presents a
unique selection of Bucher’s most significant works, along with
screenings of audiovisual documentation and never before seen archival
materials.

Born in Winterthur, Bucher moved to California in the 1960s. In the
United States, she befriended Edward Kienholz and collaborated with her
husband, Carl Bucher, on Bodyshells, a series of wearable
sculptures exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1972.
Continuing her exploration of the relationship between clothing and
architecture, she returned to Switzerland in the mid-1970s and began her
most iconic body of work, latex casts of objects and architectural
elements.

Herrenzimmer (1977-79), Bucher’s first major “Raumhaut” (room
skin), is a molding of the master bedroom of her parents’ Winterthur
house. The room’s heavy, ornate décor and familial history are literally
lifted up by the hanging process and the work’s ghostly transluscence. Grande Albergo Brissago (Eingangsportal)
(1987), which has never before been exhibited in an institutional
context, is a majestic imprint of a hotel’s grandiose entry doors. It
was realized in Brissago, a Swiss village on the western shore of Lake
Maggiore, where the European intelligentsia gathered during World War
II. Among other major works in the exhibition, Jetzt fliesst das Wasser aus der Vase (1986)
signals the artist’s interest in the representation of movement and fluidity in sculpture.

Through her conjoined process of embalming and sloughing, Bucher’s work
conjures themes of memory and extrication, documentation and
transformation. Most enduringly, the question of material remains a
thread connecting a long, performative, self-archeological undertaking.