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.