The Swiss artist Heidi Bucher was a major feminist figure on the international neoavantgarde art scene, whose work is characterized by a unique performative, yet material concept of sculpture. As early as the 1970s Bucher was experimenting with unusual materials such as latex, breathing life into them. She would pour liquid rubber onto surfaces and then pull it off again with great physical force, literally coming to grips with the world of things she experienced and pressing forward into psychological border zones. By transforming materials in ways that were as radical as they were sensual, she explored forms of human existence and how they are embedded in societal and private power structures. This monograph presents Bucher's oeuvre from her early days as a student in Zurich in the 1940s, to her experimental phase in New York and Los Angeles of the 1960s and 1970s, to her major works of "skinning" architecture and people, all the way to the pieces she created during her final years on Lanzarote.

"She, a woman of high beauty, created like no other to be Medea, Madonna, Iphigenia, Aspasia, decided one sunny winter day to escape her loneliness and to leave La Rotonda. She bought a ticket 'Aller jamais retour. Berlin Tegel'." This is the opening scene of Ulrike Ottinger's momentous 1979 film Ticket of No Return-the woman of high beauty was Tabea Blumenschein. Unconcerned by all conventions, Blumenschein adored transformation: in a distinctive, avant-garde aesthetic, the two women embraced various different identities and challenged many norms, in the process revealing the performativity of gender. Initiating a dialog between the two artists' perspectives, these books bring together for the first time Blumenschein's drawings with Ottinger's photographs from their joint performance sessions.