She cast the interior of her childhood home 20 years before Rachel Whiteread's "House", made latex hanging works at the same time as the more famous Eva Hesse, and in 1987 created "Die Quelle" (The Source), the strange giant vase spouting cascades of latex water that now appears to float over Parasol's outdoor terrace.
Entering Parasol, you encounter "Borg" (1976), Bucher's earlist "Raumhaut" or "room skin": a dark, fleshy replica of a butcher's cold store, "Kleines Glasportal, Bellevue Kreuzlingen" (1988) an interior moulding of a psychiatric hospital, by contrast has light passing thorugh rubbery translucent windows: an etheral, phantom space. Upstairs, elegant, minimalist structures from Bucher's Glye House series, "Weissleimhaus" (1976-83), suggest the miniaturised shells of houses. "Rooms are shells, rooms are skins" Bucher chnts in a film showing her coating surfaces or interiors with gauze, pouring liquid latex into it, then stripping off he shroud-like cladding to produce ghostly forms, stiff but supple, sturdy but fragile.
Memory - protecting it, escaping it, clinging to it, casting it off like an unwanted skin - and transience are Bucher's deeper themes. A favourite motif was the dragonfly, which as a larva sheds its skin to become a creature of dramatic fleeting beauty, living just a few days. The sculpture "Der Schlüpfakt der Parkettlibelle" (1983) ("The hatching of the parquet dragonfly") has a surface mixed with mother-of-pearl pigments, delicate as the insect's wings: poignant, luminescent, original as all Bucher's work.
On view through December 9, 2018