In the 1970s and 80s, Heidi Bucher made latex and rubber ‘skins’ of architectural features, whole rooms, and facades. Like few other artists of her generation, Bucher pointed out how strongly the human body remains bound up with architectonic reality, and how memories, obsessions, and dreams are materialized in the surface of spaces.
The intensely physical process of making these works involved embalming architectural elements with liquid rubber and pigments, then slowly stripping off the leathery surfaces. Bucher made her casts in spaces connected with her own biography or in historically charged buildings. Her work Bellevue (kleines Glasportal) was made in 1988 in the former psychiatric institution Bellevue in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, which expanded her practice into institutional space. The mental institution as a subject of ‘skinning’ makes reference to both psychological space and spaces of control.
Indeed, Bucher’s ‘skinning’ of architectures is an assertive, almost radical action. To the artist, this process represented a detachment from the conventions and constraints of the past. She once said about her working process, ‘We cover and discover.’
