Heidi Bucher was born in 1926 in Winterthur, Switzerland and she moved to Zurich in 1942 to study at the School of Applied Arts, where she specialised in fashion design. Textiles and garments then came to play a lifelong role throughout her artistic practice. Her first works were delicate collages made of silk, and these were first exhibited at Galerie Suzanne Feigel, Basel in 1956. Shortly after this show, encouraged by her friend dada artist Hans Bollinger, she moved to New York. There she exhibited her collages at the prestigious World House Gallery on Madison Avenue in 1958. Two years later she returned to Switzerland and met her husband, fellow artist Carl Bucher.
The young Bucher couple acquired a flat in central Zurich, where they led a distinctively bohemian family life in order to shake the shackles of their own socially conservative backgrounds. Throughout the 1960s the family spent time in Canada and California as a result of Carl’s success, but when they returned to Switzerland in the early ’70s the couple separated. It was not until now that Bucher could finally dedicate herself fully to her practice that she came to produce her iconic Hauträume, “roomskins”. She rented an old butcher’s shop in Zurich and began to experiment with latex. Her innovative technique encompassed dressing physical rooms- often historically haunted spaces such as her childhood home or the Sanatorium Bellevue where Freud treated Anna O.- with latex and then turning these ‘skins’ into sculptures. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1990 and passed away three years later. As with a lot of women artists of her generation she did not gain the recognition she deserved until after her death. Today she counts as one of the most important feminist artists of the 1970s and her work feutures in several private and public collections worldwide, such as the Modern Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris to mention a few.
