Heidi Bucher – Liesl Raff

People shape spaces—and spaces shape us. This reciprocal dynamic shapes our environment and our perceptions. The Winterthur-based artist Heidi Bucher (1926–1993) explored this relationship with great intensity. Her famous “Häutungen” transform walls, floors, and doors into shimmering latex skins. By peeling away these elastic layers, she performatively appropriated the spaces, revealing their hidden life and lending new meaning to time and memory.

Vienna-based artist Liesl Raff (*1979) addresses similar issues, though from a different artistic perspective. She lines living spaces and exhibition spaces with latex, thereby softening their harshness. Although Raff also works with latex, she views the material as a malleable, sensual substance that makes structures appear softer, more permeable, and more physical. Her installations create zones of concentration, intimacy, and security.

To mark the 100th anniversary of Heidi Bucher’s birth, the Kunst Museum Winterthur turns Kunst Museum Winterthur gaze to the present. In her 1993 notes on the renovation of Villa Bleuler, Bucher wrote: “I must get closer to everything.” For her, closeness meant a physical understanding. Raff builds on this idea and transforms the White Cube for the exhibition *Closerin* into a living structure made of fabric, latex, epoxy, steel, and springy floors. Visitors enter an atmospheric total work of art in which Bucher’s early, rarely exhibited drawings, silk collages, and frottages are sensually embedded. The tension between soft and hard materials, between light, color, and different surfaces, connects central characteristics of both artistic approaches. Both artists distill moods through a sensitive selection of materials and a trust that materials speak their own language.

Curated by Lynn Kost

Contributors and Additional Information:

Heidi Bucher

Liesl Raff