Skip to Content

The Arts Intel Report

Heidi Bucher: Metamorphoses

Oct 26, 2021 – Feb 12, 2022
Prinzregentenstraße 1, 80538 München, Germany

The Swiss artist Heidi Bucher, born in 1926, moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and there started work on her “Bodyshells.” The “Bodyshells” were large body sculptures—wearable work!—composed of latex and domed over the wearer like a mutant costume. The concept was fairly simple. Bucher was fusing fashion, design, sculpture, and fine art into one expression. And she didn’t stop there. A few years later, Bucher started her “Skinning” process, whereby she applied latex to the walls of spaces both public and private, and unpeeled it, presumably pulling the place’s essence—but not its infrastructure—into the peel. It’s a “process of metamorphosis,” she explained. Bucher died in 1993, but her experimental and conceptual work is up-to-the-minute. Here in Munich, 150 pieces, plus film and archival footage, tell her singular story. —E.C.

Installation View, “Heidi Bucher: Metamorphoses,” 2021 © The Estate of Heidi Bucher and Haus der Kunst Munich. Photo: Markus Tretter.