Current Exhibition

Seelenlandschaften

Heidi Bucher & Giovanni Segantini

On view until the 18th of October 2026

Wall Text “Seelenlandschaften – Heidi Bucher & Giovanni Segantini”, Atelier Segantini Maloja

A Touching Kinship

By Guido Magnaguagno

They did not know one another; they lived in different times. Giovanni was a painter, while Heidi

was, in the broadest sense, an object and conceptual artist. His works were created in Brianza,

Savognin and Maloja; Heidi’s in the salt warehouse in Winterthur and on Lanzarote. Both

worked in studios, houses and in the open air.

What unites them is their closeness to nature — indeed, their reverence for it.

This is perhaps most clearly expressed, in terms of motif, when Segantini’s painting Love at the

Fountain of Life is brought into relation with Heidi Bucher’s sculpture Abundance. Other

“fountains of life” appear in Segantini’s paintings, such as Girl at the Fountain, Alpine

Landscape with Woman at the Fountain, or even in the cow painting At the Trough. Water is life;

life means love. And all of this exists in “abundance”, thanks to the inexhaustible richness of

nature — a richness which, today, is increasingly being called into question.

On a formal level, Heidi and Giovanni encounter one another in the texture of their work. At the

centre of Heidi Bucher’s practice is latex, the material with which she removes the skin from

objects — some as large as rooms — and transforms them into autonomous forms or spatial

installations. In the five collages on display, she allows one such installation to sail across the

Alps, from Winterthur to Maloja: a seemingly weightless relocation to a place of longing. Her

material can enclose objects such as a dragonfly or a dress, weaving them into the latex

membrane.

Painters, too, often speak of “skin”, referring to the skin of paint that lies over the canvas,

whereby oil paint can indeed bind itself to the ground beneath. Segantini’s paint skins are often

so thick and heavy that, as in the case of the Alpine Triptych, they make transportation

impossible. Unlike the classical Divisionists, his painted surfaces form a dense, almost

impenetrable weave. If we look more closely, for example, at the detailed structure of his Vanity,

the individual brushstrokes appear interlocked — and yet these surfaces breathe. They have

even been described as carpets: carpets of flowers, carpets of grass, networks of roots.

In a highly mysterious way, the nude central figure of Vanity encounters the absent girl in Heidi

Bucher’s wall piece. Added to this is the dragonfly hovering above the mythical creature hidden

in the pond, delicately and flutteringly heightening the poetic analogy.

The elevation of nature and of life — might this be the symbiotic message of their art?