joseph scissorhands: Heidi Bucher

Sunday, 18 November 2018

Heidi Bucher

Kleines Glasportal, Bellevue Kreuzlingen
(Small glass portal, Bellevue Kreuzlingen), 1988

"Rooms are shells; rooms are skin" - Heidi Bucher

Whilst visiting the Yayoi Kusama exhibition I also caught this exhibition at the adjacent space Parasol Unit by Swiss artist Heidi Bucher (1926-1993). Kusama's show may have garnered all the media attention, but this exhibition was every bit as intriguing to me personally, as I was unaware of Bucher's art until this visit. Bucher worked in latex creating mysterious tactile casts from all manner of spaces and objects. I couldn't help but draw parallels between her work and that of Rachel Whiteread and Antony Gormley (whose casts Bucher pre-dates), who also create ghostly casts from architectural spaces, bodies and other objects. More obviously 3-D sculptural pieces such as Borg, also reminded me of the delicate, gauzy architectural environments of Do Ho Suh seen at Victoria Miro last year (here). Bucher creates her pieces from a gauzy fabric, as does Suh, but overlayed with latex to create a surface similar to a skin. Not surprisingly then Bucher called her casts Häutungen, or 'skinnings', and they certainly are like the scalped or flayed pelts of the spaces and subjects they represent, imbued with all of the pertinent memories and associations that the 'skinnings' carry. The preserved clothes in particular evoked times past and the once traditional domestic role of women, my own series of Dresses, and Joseph Beuys' Felt Suit,1970. The surfaces of some of the objects have mother-of-pearl ground into their latex surfaces giving them a beautiful, ethereal pearly opalescence. Bucher's oeuvre was a marvellous discovery.