Heidi Bucher: Exuviae

Jahn und Jahn presents an exhibition dedicated to Heidi Bucher (1926–1993), whose pioneering practice explores the relationship between body, architecture, and memory through a feminist and experiential lens. Throughout her career, Bucher develops a singular sculptural language centred on the body’s inhabitation of space and on the material translation of memory and transformation.

Beginning in the late 1950s, and following formative periods in New York, Zurich and Los Angeles, Bucher created an extensive body of work that merges sculpture, performance and process. Her early cocoons—soft, wearable structures made from fabric and latex—introduce the idea of sculpture as a shelter for the body. From the 1970s onward, she turns to latex moulding, producing “skins” of architectural elements such as doors, walls and floors. Works like “Borg (Door to the Borg)” (1976) and “Herrenzimmer” (1978–82) mark a decisive shift towards a practice that exposes domestic, social and patriarchal structures through the act of “skinning” space.

This process, which she describes as Einbalsamierungen (Embalmings), transforms interiors into translucent membranes that both preserve and reveal. The resulting latex casts, suspended and luminous, retain the physical traces of the original surfaces while evoking the psychic residues of lived experience. For Bucher, the sculptural object is not static but inhabitable, performative, and transient — a haptic form of memory and resistance.

Her work aligns with that of contemporaries such as Eva Hesse, Lynda Benglis and Judy Chicago, redefining sculpture as an act of embodiment and political awareness. Through her delicate yet radical gestures, Bucher reclaims architecture as an intimate, permeable space charged with emotional and historical meaning — a fragile architecture of remembrance that continues to resonate today.