Heidi Bucher: Exhibition in the House of Art in Munich – Culture

The slim, long-haired woman kneels in front of the window parapet, she feels the wooden cassettes until something loosens on the frame. But it is neither the wood nor the glass that she then tears off with one jerk – what she is holding in both hands looks as if the skin has been peeled off the room. Heidi Bucher briefly lifts the meter-high piece into the air, removes another corner, and works her way along the wall. The film follows her, but if you look around in the small hall of the east wing in Munich’s Haus der Kunst, you will understand that this is how the high lanes that are hung here in the square and are called “Herrenzimmer” (1978/82) were created. That they are not painted, are not a picture, nor are they a backdrop – but the impression of a room, as accurate and precise as a negative or the molding of a relief. As delicate as parchment and sparkling like amber. In the imprint of the wooden coffered walls, door frames and massive window reveals, past life seems to be enclosed – as if the railways were soaked with the customs and conventions of conservative family relationships, in which the men retreat to the paneled “master bedroom” to smoke while women and children in the Kitchen disappear.

Her work is related to that of Bruce Nauman or Gordon Matta-Clark

“Herrenzimmer” can now be seen in an exhibition for the first time in decades. But despite all the astonishment, it seems strangely familiar – as if you were stepping into a side cabinet of art history that you yourself might have simply overlooked. The scene, museums, curators, exhibition organizers and collectors had actually forgotten the name “Heidi Bucher”. Now it is emblazoned on the facade in Munich in high letters, and the work has found a place in the Haus der Kunst that is more suitable than any other for a rediscovery that she will finally anchor in the canon as a sculptor and conceptual artist. Heidi Bucher’s stringent concept makes her a singular figure, also in the context of the 1970s, who were keen to experiment; through her independent occupation with space and architecture, she is definitely related to artists such as Bruce Nauman or Gordon Matta-Clark.

Heidi Bucher, born in Winterthur in 1926, who actually studied fashion and textile design in Zurich, was taught at an early age by Johannes Itten, one of the most important art educators of the 20th century, the Bauhaus master, whose holistic pedagogy was part of the preliminary course for Bauhaus teaching Decisively influenced generations of artists. Although Bucher initially used materials such as silk or tulle, her earliest designs already show that the artist was interested in more than just cutting, repeats and patterns – her studies with aluminum, wood and cardboard are primarily sculptural.

Her preoccupation with textiles, costumes and space then resulted in her first sculptures in Canada and the USA – where she lives with her husband Carl Bucher – the “Bodyshells” (1972). These were inspired by snails and shells and marine animals, but whoever slipped into such a costume made of fabric and foam as a performer disappeared into it like a flower vase. A film, which is shown in the retrospective like an overture before the monumental molds, documents the rehearsal of a performance for the LACMA Museum in Los Angeles on the sand of Venice Beach: The huge, bright “bodyhells” sway almost like a dance in front of the surf around, now and then the head or arms of the performers appear like the limbs of a hermit crab. The monumental aspect of this work is indicated here just as much as its humanity. Because time and again it opens up the possibility of being viewed in a completely different way: as a costume, as a worn floor, as a door frame.

The “skins” also target the claims to power that are reflected in architecture

The impression of the main hall that adjoins it is overwhelming – but bearable. There, the curators Jana Baumann and Luisa Seipp laid out the floor molds, hung them and let them float from the ceiling. It almost seems as if one has playfully flagged the huge exhibition space, which is actually tailored to the overwhelming dimensions of National Socialist art. The imprints of boards and nails appear at eye level in front of the viewer, making the grid of a wooden parquet look like a complicated pattern. Tiles, tiles, wooden tablets emerge in light lines, dissolve in the box. But Heidi Bucher’s impressions – despite their beauty – have something of the coldness with which leaves, mice or organs are dissected and preserved in the laboratory, that which is alive is prepared for viewing. Some viewers may also remember the cruel love of Hannibal Lecter in the film “Silence of the Lambs”.

How precisely these tracks can be put together again to form the architecture, on the other hand, is shown in the small rooms. There you can see not only the “Herrenzimmer”, which was part of Bucher’s parents’ house, but also the “Ancestral House” (1980 to 1982) of her grandparents. It was a clever idea of ​​the curators to set aside these “skins” the films that have never been shown publicly before and document their production: The concentration and almost ritual calm with which the artist goes about her craft makes it clear that Heidi Bucher is about more went as just sculpture. As interventions, the “skins” also aim at the claims to power that are reflected in architecture. Heidi Bucher distributed latex, paste and strips of fabric not only in the grandparents’ house, but also in the room in which the supposed hysteria patient Anna O., who would later become women’s rights activist Bertha Pappenheim, was treated. The artist chose the entrance portal of the Grand Hotel Brissago on Lake Maggiore because Jewish children and women were interned there during the rule of the National Socialists. The history of the Haus der Kunst, built as a gallery by the National Socialists, gives these works a framework that couldn’t be more exciting.

The history-conscious, wide-awake oeuvre of Heidi Bucher would have been important in connection with the debates about the culture of remembrance in the nineties and in the context of the feminist-activist work of women artists after the turn of the millennium. But it is almost pointless to discuss why a sculptor fell victim to the amnesia of an art scene that was as novelty as it was forgetful, even though it was shown in galleries, museums or off-spaces until her death in 1993 and was closely friends with artists like Ed Kienholz . Because now her work has found a pedestal that is more suitable than any other: The Munich House of Art has rendered outstanding services to the work of female sculptors for a number of years, and since Okwui Enwezor with an exhibition by Louise Bourgeois, the monumental halls for women artists have also been there opened. The rooms, cages and backdrops of the great French artist shown at the time, like the works of Heidi Bucher, play with the materiality and authentic character of interiors. Painters such as the American Kiki Smith and Marlene Dumas were shown in the Haus der Kunst. And above all, the immediately preceding exhibition on the work of the British Phyllida Barlow has already made the public familiar with the unbiased joy of experimentation of a generation of post-war artists who work with simple materials that bring performance and ritual into sculpture and insist on a female subjectivity. So if a door in art history can open for this extraordinary oeuvre by Heidi Bucher, then it will be there, of all places, in the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Heidi Bucher. Metamorphoses. Until February 13th in Munich House of Art. The exhibition will then be shown in the Kunstmuseum Bern (April 8 to August 7, 2022), then from July 9 to December 11 in the Muzeum Susch. The catalog will be published on October 25th and will cost 60 euros.