SUSCH.- Running from 16 July to 4 December, Metamorphoses II at Muzeum Susch mixes newly rediscovered and restored filmic material of Swiss artist Heidi Bucher’s (1926, Winterthur – 1993, Brunnen) practice together with sculptural installations and works on paper. Dedicated to revising a matrilineal art historical canon, Muzeum Susch opens a dialogue to consider Bucher’s practice through the lens of performance for the first time in her native country.

The exhibition presents over 70 key works across the artist’s practice from her early wearable and danceable Bodyshells created in the early 1970s in the United States to her characteristic works with latex from her time in Switzerland and late works made on Lanzerote. Bucher is best known for her skinnings, sculptural works created by layering latex and gauze onto largescale surfaces which were then arduously pulled off. Her performative use of the material culminated in a play with the presence and absence of the body. Furthermore organic and structured, these symbolically charged membranes entertain a close relationship with the skin.

Bucher began creating her main body of work in 1973, when she was already approaching fifty, after her return from the United States and her separation from Carl Bucher. In an effort to come to terms with female oppression, she created a world of images in the form of embalmed and soft objects, including major works on view in the exhibition such as Bed (1975) or Anna with Herself (1978). Made of found objects, on which latex and mother-of-pearl pigments have been applied, these works reference the culture of domesticity while offering a way to subvert repression.

In her manifesto Parquet Dragonfly, Bucher described her artistic work as a ‘process of metamorphosis’, in which the stripping away of social conditioning would be accompanied by a softening and mobilisation of objects – symbols of fixed and unchanging conditions. The theme of the metamorphosis culminates in Dragonfly (Costume), a work from 1976 made of wall skinnings rubbed with mother-of-pearl pigments and arranged in the shape of a dragonfly. She would often wrap herself in her freshly completed skinnings during performances.

Bucher’s interest gradually shifted towards the interplay between the identity-forming function of architecture and the human body. She first turned to objects and places from her own family history, such as her parental home in Winterthur-Wülflingen (1978) and the ‘Ahnenhaus’, her ancestral home, by means of latex floor skinnings (1980–82). By detaching the architecture from its originally static context, it is itself exhibited, with a focus on its charged meaning. Later, the conflict between the private and the public was to become her guiding theme as she turned her attention to various social institutions such as a prison or a psychiatric clinic in the 1980s. All the key works created in the private psychiatric clinic Bellevue in Kreuzlingen on Lake Constance in 1988 will be brought together for the first time at Muzeum Susch, as well as a selection of photographs and objects from her intervention in a penitentiary in Le Landeron, a small town near Neuchâtel.

During the last decade of her career, the island of Lanzarote became an inspiring retreat for Heidi Bucher. There, she focused on nature and ecological aspects. The element of water, considered both the end and the beginning of a new life, became central to her work, eventually becoming a metaphor for her own untimely death.

Set in dialogue with the architecture of Muzeum Susch, Bucher’s characteristic skinning’s reflect on her ongoing preoccupation with the interaction between psychology and space, specifically the gender, social, and political norms historically associated with it. With the radical body and space transformations, Bucher’s work sheds light on previously unknown artistic processes that aim at alternative visions of society characterised by healing.

The exhibition is guest curated by Dr. Jana Baumann, Senior Curator at Haus der Kunst, Munich. In addition to the exhibition Heidi Bucher. Metamorphoses II at Muzeum Susch, Kunstmuseum Bern is showing the exhibition Heidi Bucher. Metamorphoses I from 8.4 until 7.8.2022. Heidi Bucher. Metamorphoses is an exhibition by Haus der Kunst in cooperation with Kunstmuseum Bern and Muzeum Susch.