Heidi Bucher

Heidi Bucher's fascination with the interplay between art and fashion gave rise to wearable genderless body sculptures back in the early 1970s in California. The works celebrated her concept of sculpture as something between performance and object. Already at this time, she began to experiment with unusual materials such as rubber, which she applied to surfaces in liquid form and pulled off again with great physical force after it had solidified. With material transformations that were at once radical and sensual, she investigated human forms of existence and their embedding in power structures. In doing so, she was always dedicated to a critical subversion of normative gender roles. This monograph presents Bucher’s oeuvre from its beginnings in Zurich in the 1940s, to the experimental phase in New York and Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s and the main body of work with architectural and human skins, to the works she created in the last years of her life on Lanzarote. The sculptor and performative artist HEIDI BUCHER (1926–1993) was raised in Switzerland, studied under Johannes Itten in Zurich, and enjoyed her initial successes in the late 1960s in New York and California. Her works can be found in numerous museums and private collections around the world.