Dragonflies are elegant flying creatures. They can control their pairs of wings independently of each other. This enables some species to appear to hover in the air or even fly backwards. These soulful predators catch their prey, mosquitoes or flies, with their legs directly in flight. They begin their existence as aquatic larvae, which eventually transform through several skins into metallic, iridescent aerial creatures. This metamorphosis makes the sun-loving insects a symbol of adaptability and transformation. Their trace goes back to the late Palaeozoic era. Giant dragonflies with a wingspan of up to 76 centimeters characterized the primeval swamp and bog forests. They were the largest insects that ever lived on earth. The sublimity of the dragonfly comes from the depths of unimaginably long periods of time. “The dragonfly will be the messiah.” [1] The Japanese natural philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka was convinced of this. The dragonfly will be the Messiah.

The dragonfly was a recurring motif in Heidi Bucher’s art, as can be seen in the eight collages entitled “Der Schlüpfakt der Parkett Libelle” from 1981. For its “emancipation flight”, the dragonfly had to “take off and skin itself with energy and force”, Bucher wrote in her undated manifesto entitled “Parquet Dragonfly”. And further: “The metamorphosis is completed in the hatching act, because it symbolizes the breakthrough. The greenish liquid stretches the head, thorax and legs as well as the wings and makes them transparent. The whole dragonfly stretches The exuvia falls away and lies everywhere in the swamps.” [2] The molting leaves its mark.

The term “exuvia”, Latin for “clothing”, is used in some animals to describe the “shed skin”, the shed outer body covering. We humans literally cannot get out of our skin. Only in literature or the other arts do we transform ourselves into insects. But with clothing and architecture, humans have acquired additional, “second” skins in the course of their evolution. That is why Martin Heidegger wrote: “To be a human being […] means to dwell.” [3] Living is life. Every change of clothes is also like shedding a skin. In the art of Heidi Bucher, who became famous for her “skinning” of rooms, various cultural and natural discourses intersect in a poetic and wonderfully enigmatic way. This determines the growing topicality and relevance of her work for contemporary art.

“Our memory always extends to the limits of the space we have perceived”, Bucher noted. “Everything that is remembered thus lies in a spatial shell that may be regarded as the last surface.” [4] Bucher’s skinning also appears to be an almost magical procedure, because in the process of embalming and skin peeling the time dimensions literally fall into one another. “The lived, the past gets caught in the cloth and gets stuck”, wrote the artist. “We slowly loosen the layers of rubber, the skin, and pull the yesterday into the present. The images are the images of tomorrow.” [5] Localised architecture and its parts, such as the floor piece from the “Ahnenhaus” from 1979, are transformed into something mobile and circulate in the network of art. They learn to fly. The comprehensive retrospective, which was shown at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2021 and subsequently travelled to Bern and Susch, vividly demonstrated this fact.

Between 1944 and 1947, Bucher studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Zurich. Her teachers were the textile designer Elsi Giauque and the two former Bauhaus masters Johannes Itten and Max Bill. After completing her studies, she spent extended periods abroad in Paris, Hamburg and the south of France. During a one-year au pair stay in London in 1948, Bucher produced her first abstract collages with glued-on textiles, mother-of-pearl buttons and shell fragments. Portrait drawings were created in the early 1950s, at the same time as Bucher moved into her first studio. The artist, who was still called Adelheid Müller at the time, had returned to Switzerland and found a place to work in Zurich’s old town. [6] Her son Mayo Bucher, who today manages the estate together with his brother Indigo, sees the concentrated nature of Bucher’s drawings as a reflection of her “egalitarian nature.” “The aim was not to make all the people portrayed the same, but to make them equal.”[7] The sheets also impressively demonstrate the artist’s masterful control of the reduced line. Bucher focused on the essentials. She stayed that way when she later turned her attention to the rooms. This freedom and unconditionality make her art modern and essential.

[1] Masonobu Fukuoka,The Dragonfly will be the Messiah, Penguin Green Ideas 17, Penguin Classics Dublin 2021. [2] “Parkettlibelle”, facsimile, without date, reproduced in: Haus der Kunst (ed.): Heidi Bucher. Metamorphosen, Hatje Cantz Berlin, 2021, p.227. [3] Martin Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen Denken”, in: ders., Gesamtausgabe. I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1910-1976, Vol. 7 Vorträge und Aufsätze, Klostermann Frankfurt am Main 2000, p.149. [4] “Projektskizze zu Häutung in Teguise”, facsimile, without date, reproduced in: Haus der Kunst (ed.): Heidi Bucher. Metamorphosen, Hatje Cantz Berlin, 2021, p.252-253, here p.252. [5] Heidi Bucher. Häutungen, Galerie im Weissen Haus, Winterthur 1993. [6] Cf. Indigo Bucher and Mayo Bucher, “Biografische Notizen zu Heidi Bucher” in: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst Zurich (ed.), Heidi Bucher. Mother of Pearl, JRP/Ringier Kunstverlag Zurich, 2004, p.126-127. [7] Conversation of the author with Mayo Bucher, Wallisellen near Zurich, June 2024.

Kito Nedo