Silvia Bächli
Born in 1956.
Silvia Bächli according to some sources, in Baden), has established herself through the consistency of a graphic language centred on drawing on paper. She lives and works primarily in Basel, while also spending periods in residence in Paris. Her practice is essentially devoted to drawings on paper, executed in gouache, India ink, charcoal and pastel, in which the line—linear, repeated and often poised between figuration and abstraction—plays a structuring role.
At the outset of her career, in the 1970s, she participated in the founding of the alternative space Filiale in Basel, a project undertaken with Eric Hattan and Beat Wismer. Her institutional visibility grew over time, notably through a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1996. In 2006, MAMCO in Geneva devoted a monographic presentation to her entitled Poèmes sans prénoms.
Her work was also shown at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, where an exhibition was dedicated to her in 2007. In 2009, she was selected to represent Switzerland in the Swiss Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Collaboration and dialogue with other artists are also evident in joint projects, such as the presentation Neige en mai (in collaboration with Eric Hattan) at the Kunsthalle Nürnberg in 2011.
The presence of her works in public collections is documented, notably at the Musée d'art et d'histoire in Geneva. References to exhibitions and collections—the Kunsthalle Bern (1996), MAMCO Geneva (2006), the Centre Pompidou (2007), the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2009), the Kunsthalle Nürnberg (2011), and the Musée d'art et d'histoire in Geneva—form a body of documentation attesting to the international and institutional circulation of her work. Across these various exhibition contexts, her drawings retain an expressive economy: light grounds, a restrained chromatic palette, and an emphasis on the line as a site for registering gesture, repetition and suspension.
