How to turn the world inside out — Heidi Bucher Metamorphoses I
The exhibition of the Kunsmuseum Bern is presenting the figure of Heidi Bucher (1926 - 1993) as a women and an artist, hanker into her past, her life and her skin...
Well-known ? but, for what ? and for who ?
The artist once said: "Rooms are shells, are skins. Peel off one skin after the other, discard it: the repressed, the neglected, the wasted, the lost, the sunken, the flattened, the desolate, the inverted, the diluted, the forgotten, the persecuted, the wounded." (1981).
Born on February 23, 1926, in the Swiss town of Winterthur (Switzerland), Heidi Bucher (also name Adelheid Hildegard Muller) is born in a family of engineers. Later on, she will train as a women tailor under the supervision of Marguerite Strossler. She will go back to school, meet with the teachers of the Bauhaus such as Johannes Itten and Max Bill, while attending a fashion and textile study at the School of Applied Arts of Zurich.
After the war, Heidi Bucher will be free and stays abroad in Paris, Hambourg and the South of France while working part time in London. During those time, she will create fabric and silk collage for the World House Galleries. At the same moment, many museums present works by Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee.
After all of those adventure, Heidi Bucher will receive a grant from the Conseil des arts du Canada. The finally of this grant will be an exhibition of the works of Carl and Heidi Bucher at the Musée d'Art Contemporain of Montréal in 1971.
After a short stay in Los Angeles, she will come by to Switzerland and divorced from Carl Bucher. She will become independent again, have her own studio in Zurich and visit numerous ruined of hotels and buildings to create her famous "skin building".
In 1991, she died in Brunnen as an unknown Swiss figure. 3 years later, she will shine again and being awarded with a price for culture of the city of Wintherthour and 10 years later with an exhibition at the Museum for Gegenwartskunst of Zurich. In the last 10 years, beside this exhibition (in three venues), Heidi Bucher was showed five times, only in Europe.
This exhibition is made by the Haus der Kunst, Munich, in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Muzeum Susch.
FOCUS
After returning from the west coat, the artist established her studio in a former butcher’s shop in Zürich. She transforms everything in it, expect the cold-storage room, which is called a Borg, a place of “Ge-borg-enheit” (literally safety or security.).
At that time, her experiment focus on recreating trace of well-known place of her life such as her studio and her family house. With this appropriation and transformation of a public/private space, Bucher tries to emphases the idea of memories in a 3D form.
In a sense, the Borg is the personification of a refugee and a studio, in which Heidi Bucher scrape the old space to create her own copy. With this oeuvre, she's paying homage to her love for engineering and architecture, with extreme details encompassing the doorframe, the curved, the shining of the room and the keyhole.
From the early 1980s until the end of her life, Heidi Bucher depend on most of her time in the Canary Island of Lanzarote. In this calm environment, she will focus only on abandoned places, and how she can transformed it into an architecture miracle with the use of latex.
All of them made between 1983 and 1993, those works are among the most intense exploration of architectural structures of both interior and exterior spaces. For her, those part of house are like the body that belong to them at one point or another, and how this door keeps them alive, enclose them into an architecture and into a safe space.
During her stay, she will only focus on the relatively small subject of doors, made with latex fabric castings and splinters of wood and residues of paint that adhered to the latex, which tells use the past of this material.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Kunstmuseum Bern
Date: 8.4.2022 – 7.8.2022
Curators: Kathleen Bühler and Marlene Wenger
Ticket: Available online OR at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Kunstmuseum Bern
Holderstrasse 12
CH-3011 Bern
Phone: +41 31 328 09 44
Mail: info@kunstmuseumbern.ch