Lehmann Maupin returns to Art Basel with a presentation exploring the relationship between identity and place. Employing traditional and nontraditional processes spanning painting, embroidery, glass beads, and metalwork, artists including Heidi Bucher, Do Ho Suh, Liu Wei, and Nari Ward question what it means to belong simultaneously to oneself and to one’s community. The works on view weave a complex tapestry of various cultural, geographic, collaborative, and psychic threads. In so doing, the presentation elucidates the tensions therein while gesturing towards the utopian possibilities posed by deep connections across time and space, language and culture.

At the fair, the gallery will present late artist Heidi Bucher’s Untitled iridescent soft sculpture, Zurich, (1974), part of a series of soft sculptures created in Los Angeles during the mid-1970s. The sculpture, made from mother-of-pearl pigments, foam material, and net lace, is wearable and meant to cover the body completely, creating an architectural structure that consumes the human form. Bucher created a number of self-portraits while wearing Untitled iridescent soft sculpture, Zurich, where she appears as though wearing a set of soft yet geometric butterfly wings. Bucher’s wearable sculptures exemplify her decades-long examination of the relationship between the body, clothing, and architectural space. The work explores the physical boundaries between the body and its surroundings through a distinctly feminine lens, blurring the lines between clothing and skin, object and person, public and private. Bucher will open a solo exhibition on July 6 in the gallery’s Seoul location, on the heels of her major retrospective, Spaces are Shells, are Skins at Art Sonje Center.