Lehmann Maupin presents Lanzarote, Heidi Bucher’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition focuses on the late artist’s time on the island of Lanzarote, one of the Spanish Canary Islands, where she spent the last years of her life (1983—1993). Lanzarote offers a poignant consideration of the last chapter of Bucher’s decades-long project to probe the intersection of architecture, bodies, and their surrounding environments through a selection of symbolically resonant door “skinnings.” The exhibition opens on the heels of Bucher’s major retrospective titled Spaces are Shells, are Skins, presented at Art Sonje Center in Seoul.
Heidi Bucher is best known for her architectural latex castings that draw an analogy between physical structures and the human body. In her work, architecture is the shell that surrounds and protects the contents of a home, much like a skin. Her use of latex turns this concept into an overtly visual metaphor; latex, when it dries, takes on a fleshy color, texture, and malleability. Bucher’s architectural castings, which she called “roomskins” (Hauträume), focus on ancestral and familial homes and other places of significance to the artist. They represent a personal “molting” process, as Bucher sheds old “skins” and leaves old places behind. At the same time, the roomskins memorialize the personal and cultural histories so deeply rooted in the specificity of place. Bucher’s practice employs a distinctly feminist approach, blurring the lines between building and skin, object and subject, public and private.
To create her skinnings, Bucher and her studio assistant covered objects in latex, painting the liquid material onto the surface of the structure. Latex coalesces as it dries. Once dry, Bucher peeled the material back from the structure like a layer of skin. The results are semi-transparent, ghostly swaths of flesh-like material that retain the shape and texture of their source objects. They reference the hard-edged and meticulously-planned nature of architecture, yet they are also soft and malleable. Latex, like human skin, visibly changes as it ages. Over time, the material darkens into a deep umber and hardens. Bucher’s castings show traces of this process, indexing time on their surfaces in much the same way that human skin records and recounts the story of a lifetime.
In the early 1980s, Bucher spent increasing amounts of time on Lanzarote. She was inspired by the stark blue and white architecture, set against an arid landscape of volcanic rock. Lanzarote became a kind of creative retreat for the artist, and eventually she acquired a property in the Teguise community. She named the rustic house Palacio Ico and used it as a live/work space despite the lack of running water and electricity. Palacio Ico became the primary subject of her skinning practice. She was particularly drawn to the structure’s doors, whose surfaces boasted an unusual patinated color: two planes of varied shades of teal and turquoise with the underlying texture of wood emerging intermittently across their surface. Bucher created numerous latex castings of the Palacio Ico’s doors, as well as its balconies and other exterior elements, repeatedly skinning the structure until shortly before her death in 1993.
Bucher’s Untitled (Puerta del Palacio Ico) (1986) retains visible traces of the teal patina. Detritus and paint clung to the latex as it dried and are now embedded in the surface of the work, bringing indexical elements of the historical object into the gallery space. The work has aged gracefully over time, deepening into the color of rust punctuated with dark flecks and wooden splinters. The doors carry both the cultural history of their original site and the personal history of their maker.
Bucher’s latex door skinnings presented in Lanzarote were among her last works. The ghostly portals appear to float, suggesting a liminal state between creation and destruction, endurance and deterioration, life and death. As she cast the doors of her last creative home, the artist passed across a final threshold—her last metamorphosis and penultimate shedding of skin. The works in Lanzarote may close the door of her artistic career, and yet, they open her oeuvre onto new and expansive interpretations.