An artist with skin in the game

After divorcing her husband in 1973, Swiss artist Heidi Bucher (1926-93) rented a former windowless underground frozen meat storage facility, in Zurich, and turned it into her workshop. There she began the career as an independent artist, and it became a place where she felt secure and discovered self-identity, embarking on a path to establish a pioneering style of her time.

Bucher was later known for making full use of latex to create works that dwell on family structures, individual memories and collective experiences of history and society. Over 100 works from her oeuvre, comprising drawings, collages and the "wearable sculptures" that she is famous for, as well as images, have been brought to a major retrospective show, at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing through to Oct 8.