Swiss artist Heidi Bucher's 'skinning' of patriarchal spaces speaks of metamorphosis, liberation

Installation view of "The Parlour Office of Doctor Binswanger" (1988), right, and "Small Glass Portal" (1988) at Art Sonje Center in central Seoul as part of Swiss artist Heidi Bucher's first-ever retrospective in Asia, "Heidi Bucher: Spaces are Shells, are Skins" / Courtesy of Art Sonje Center

By Park Han-sol

A room is suspended in midair, furnished with period doors, windows, wooden panels and a radiator in one corner.

While perfectly enterable, it's not a solidly rendered space; rather, it's a spectral cast of the architecture ― or, as Swiss artist Heidi Bucher (1926-93) put it, the "skin" of it.

As Bucher mummified the interior of a building ― by layering its surface with gauze, spreading liquid latex on top of it and peeling off the dried mold with all her strength ― she also embalmed the personal and historical, often gendered, memories associated with these spaces.

"Heidi Bucher: Spaces are Shells, are Skins" at Art Sonje Center in central Seoul is the first-ever retrospective mounted in Asia that highlights the long-overlooked oeuvre of the groundbreaking Swiss sculptor and performance artist.

Along with archival footage, the show brings together over 130 pieces of her "skinning"-based installations, sculptures and drawings.

A scene from Heidi Bucher's "Skinning of Gentlemen's Study" (1978) / Courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher

Several of the artist's fabric casts on display capture traces of the past contained in her ancestral home in the northern Swiss city of Winterthur.

In "Parquet Flooring of the Gentlemen's Study," she skinned the flooring of the room that has, for generations, been reserved for the family's patriarch, including her late father, whom she had a complicated, sometimes fraught, relationship with, as one of her sons, Mayo Bucher, recalled.

Her interest in such traditional gender norms embedded within the domestic environment eventually went beyond her own family house and reached the psychiatric hospital in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, that is known for the famous medical case involving Anna O.

In the late 19th century, the patient, whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim, was diagnosed with hysteria ― an alleged "mental disorder" that was once widely and inaccurately assumed to only affect women due to the understudied female anatomy and sexuality ― and became the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's first case history.

Bucher laboriously pulled the molds off the wall of the hospital's consulting room where Anna O was treated in "The Parlour Office of Doctor Binswanger."

For the Swiss sculptor, the skinning of such patriarchal architectural structures ― both personal and sociocultural ― was her way of critically responding to and liberating herself from the past, Moon Je-yun, Art Sonje Center's project director and co-curator of the Seoul exhibition, said during the press preview.

"She achieved this not by destroying the rigid, masculine domain outright, but by transforming it into something soft and pliable."

A scene from Heidi Bucher's "Bodyshells" (1972) / Courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher

From wearable sculptures to skinning of spaces

In the early 1970s, Bucher, who previously pursued fashion and textiles studies at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts under the Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten, first explored the interplay between the human body and architecture through a series of wearable sculptures.

After having relocated to California with her husband and fellow artist, Carl Bucher, and two children, she presented oversized foam bodysuits such as "Bodyshells" and "Bodywrappings" as genderless body sculptures.

For the first time since the artist's death, "Bodywrappings" have been recreated at Art Sonje Center in collaboration with The Estate of Heidi Bucher. After viewing the archival photograph and footage, visitors are able to try on the portable sculptures themselves.

But Bucher's practice took a momentous turn in 1973 upon her return to her homeland and her divorce that followed shortly afterward.

As a recently divorced mother with two children in a country that granted women the right to vote merely two years ago, she had to overcome hurdle after hurdle to keep her creative passion lit.

Heidi Bucher's "Dragonfly Lust (Costume)" (1976) / Courtesy of Art Sonje Center

Heidi Bucher wearing "Dragonfly Lust (Costume)" in Zurich in 1976 / Courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher

After converting a cold storage basement in the former butcher's premises in Zurich into her studio, the artist turned toward the act of "skinning" bodies and eventually, architectural structures.

As evidenced by her earlier wearable latex cast called "Dragonfly Lust (Costume)," she frequently went on to pay tribute to the flying insect, which must shed its skin to grow.

Similarly, she viewed the whole act of shedding the skin of an object as a type of metamorphosis, where the human body or the space is freed from the rigid gender and ideological norms and transforms into malleable fabric.

This idea of elasticity and liberation is further visualized in her later works like "The Water Flows Out of the Pitcher Today" produced on the Spanish island of Lanzarote. The piece portrays a pitcher on a stool with a cascade of latex water gushing out from its spout.

"Our mother, she was a person who wanted to change inside, and to do this, she had to free herself from her past ― first from her father and patriarchal environment, and later on, from our father and artist Carl Bucher, and then of course, from different aspects which surround us in society," the artist's other son, Indigo Bucher, said, adding that the renewed global attention to her oeuvre shows "that our mother is more alive than ever."

Installation view of Heidi Bucher's "The Water Flows Out of the Pitcher Today" (1986), center, and "Flying Skinroom" (1981), left / Courtesy of Art Sonje Center

Bucher's interest in metamorphosis puts her pieces in dialogue with another group exhibition running concurrently at the Seoul museum, "Living in Joy."

Organized by Spanish curator and art historian Chus Martinez, the show exhibits the dynamic paintings and installations of three young women artists here ― Park Rondi, Park Boma, Woo Hannah ― as a contemporary "Korean response to Heidi's works" addressing the topics of labor, marriage and body.

Both "Heidi Bucher: Spaces are Shells, are Skins" and "Living in Joy" run through June 25 at Art Sonje Center.

Installation view of the group exhibition, "Living in Joy," which has been organized as a contemporary "Korean response to Heidi's works" / Courtesy of Art Sonje Center