Like an expert butcher, Swiss artist Heidi Bucher (who died in 1993) was a master of flaying skin. But it wasn’t animals that she peeled with intricate precision, it was whole lives.
Draped and hung in the rooms of this show of work from the last two decades of her life are latex casts of rooms, spaces and people. Bucher would cover them in liquid latex then peel it back to reveal a grim, medical specimen-like impression of the thing itself.
By far the most striking works here are the larger wall pieces, whole rooms rendered in dry, yellowing, skin-like latex. They’ve become wrinkled, shrunken, contorted memories of spaces.
Upstairs, Bucher has done the same thing with clothing and bodies. The best of these are the simplest – like petrified pyjamas found in some rotting tomb. Less good is when she strays from capturing the reality of things and gets all fantastical, moulding the shapes into dragonflies or suspending pots in mid-air, pouring out a frozen stream of latex. Just a bit too far from the harsh honesty of the other pieces.
The powerful message in her work is that places and things themselves aren’t important, it’s what they leave behind that matters: the memories, the pain, the feelings. The rooms that she cast may not exist any more, but the impressions they left are going to last a long time.
