People create rooms for specific purposes, which they use and modify. Over time, their purpose may change, with life making its mark gradually or abruptly. Winterthur artist Heidi Bucher (1926–1993) was known for “skinning” private rooms that she had inhabited as a child, just as much as she was for her works in institutions such as the Bellevue Psychiatric Institute in Kreuzlingen and the Grande Albergo Brissago. In recent years, her innovative oeuvre has attracted international attention. She applied latex to walls and floors, later peeling it away like skin. In this way, she transformed the inflexible boundaries of rooms into a garment that carries the traces of time like a hidden pattern. Using this skinning procedure, she physically appropriated spaces. She wrapped herself in this elastic skin like a cocoon and reemerged transformed in a performative act.

For artists who explore the subject of space, the museum as a space defined by an institution represents a particular challenge. Since the beginning of modernism, space has been not only been understood as a place of presentation but also as an integral component of an artist’s work. Vienna-based artist Liesl Raff (b. 1979 in Stuttgart, Germany) fundamentally transformed the existing spaces and structures of the museum. She, too, works with latex, although she takes advantage of the material’s transformability and suppleness to intensify the sensuous impact of latex. Her sculptural interventions create spaces of concentration. In her practice, she explores two basic principles of sculpture: the formation process of a form using the casting process and its presence in space.

The Kunst Museum Winterthur celebrates the centenary of Heidi Bucher’s birth by looking at her work from a contemporary perspective instead of as a historical review. In the exhibition Closer, Heidi Bucher and Liesl Raff are juxtaposed in a dialogue. Raff transforms the white cube into a network of intimate moments and open structures made of fabric, latex, and other materials. In this atmospheric space, Bucher’s little-known, fragile drawings are given a contemporary stage of sensuous depth.

Curated by Lynn Kost