The Swiss artist Heidi Bucher once described her work like that of a forensic scientist: “We paste the rooms and then listen. We observe the surface and coat it. We wrap and unwrap. The lived, the past, becomes entangled in the cloth and remains fixed there. Slowly we loosen the layers of rubber, the skin, and drag yesterday into today.” These words describe the Häutung (or “skinning”) process that resulted in Bucher’s most plangent works, several of which are included in her current solo exhibition at freymond-guth Fine Arts. Exemplifying the new resurgence of interest in Bucher’s work (with exhibitions at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris, The Approach in London, Musée Rath in Geneva, and Palazzo Cavour in Turin already scheduled this year), “Water, Houses” offers a critical reassessment of the artist’s later work that is broader and more balanced than the psychological and biographical readings that have dominated its reception since her death in 1993. Born in Winterthur in 1926, Bucher exhibited her work throughout her lifetime within Europe and in the United States, which is where she also lived and worked for a number of years. It was there that the comical, futuristic costumes she created out of …

A few weeks ago I found myself in the winter chill outside Kunsthaus Zurich, watching a trance-like Yorgos Sapountzis methodically pace the platz as he dragged a tattered bouquet of bright, flag-like fabrics attached to poles behind him. After herding the audience about like an expert cowpoke, he and his two festively dressed female attendants (looking ready for a freak folk concert in more pastoral pastures) disappeared behind Rodin’s imposing Gate of Hell, which famously fronts the Kunsthaus. Suddenly a racket of noise—amateur banging, thunderish clapping—began. The Greek artist reappeared, stormed into the crowd, then just as quickly disappeared into traffic. A tram rolled past, some polizei nosed about, and the performance was over. Conjuring both a vague religious processional and a casual neo-pagan ritual, Sapountzis’s performance had begun inside, near a huge Hodler frieze depicting a battle scene. As the Berlin-based artist swirled up and down a flight of marble stairs wrapped in brilliantly colored textiles, a film of public statuary gelled with crass, fluorescent hues was projected against an ad-hoc structure of more bright cloth tied to thin scaffolding, over which a propulsive electronic soundtrack drummed on. With its strange admixture of reticence and inspiration, the performance was a …