The house describes Bucher, who died in 1993, as a visionary who was ahead of her time. In her work, Bucher deals with topics that have universal validity: the power gap between the sexes, liberation from social constraints and the attempt to shake off one’s own past and reinvent oneself into old age.
Bodies, spaces, shells
Around 100 works illustrate Heidi Bucher’s artistic development and her recurring themes and motifs. In the early 1970s, Bucher moved to America, where she came into contact with American-style feminist art.
The genderless, wearable body sculptures “Bodyshells” were created. With the predecessors of the “Bodyshells”, which she created in collaboration with Carl Bucher, Heidi Bucher even made it onto the cover of the first German-language edition of Harper’s Bazaar, effortlessly crossing the gap between art, fashion and pop culture.
Her main work included the so-called “latex skins”. Bucher fixed gauze to the walls and coated them with liquid latex, which she then removed with great physical effort.
The sites of the “sloughing” often had private and public significance at the same time. In her parents’ house, for example, she skinned the study, which had previously been reserved mainly for male family members, and thus symbolically replaced the patriarchal family structure.
Beginnings in textile and fashion design
Like many artists of her time, Heidi Bucher did not initially turn to the fine arts at the beginning of her career, but to the applied arts. She studied fashion and textile design with Johannes Itten, Max Bill and Elsi Giauque in Zurich, where she created works on paper and experimented with silk and tulle. Bucher’s late work was created in Lanzarote, among other places.
Works by Bucher can be found in renowned houses such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the Center Pompidou in Paris. The Bucher retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Bern opens its doors on April 8th and lasts until August 7th, 2022.
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