Heidi Bucher

I look at the walls, the doors, the windows, the ceilings and the floors. I touch them. I observe them for a long time. I must come closer to everything. I come, we come at the right time, with gauze. We glue it in all the spaces and listen carefully. – Heidi Bucher

Heidi Bucher’s Skinnings series is a study of the relationship and boundaries between architectural structures and the human body. Started in 1975, the series depicts the architectural spaces Bucher inhabited as receptacles of memory and experience that were very much a living, breathing part of her life. By “casting” these spaces in latex and then “skinning” them by peeling off the latex membrane, Bucher sought to capture the essence of a room or an entire building, such as her grandmother’s home or her studio in the Canary Islands. Along with documenting her personal history, Bucher was also interested in exploring feminism, domestication, and collective memory, as seen in her “skinning” of the Bellevue Sanatorium in Switzerland. Famously, in 1882, Anna O. was sent there for hysteria, a now discredited diagnosis of neurosis that was given to 19th-century women who experienced uncontrollable and excessive emotional behaviors. Anna O.’s treatment is regarded as marking the beginning of psychoanalysis, and her case first appeared in Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s studies on Hysteria in 1895. Bucher’s Skinnings explore notions of limitation and domesticity, using them almost like footprints that allowed her to preserve and recreate history.

Heidi Bucher (b. 1926, Winterthur, Switzerland; d. 1993, Brunnen) lived in Winterthur.

Her work is included in numerous museums and private collections worldwide including Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich; Kunsthaus Zug, Zug; Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Lucerne; KunstmuseumWinterthur, Winterthur; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Tate Modern, London.