Silvia Bächli: Partitura (Score)

With the support of

The ground bass in my work is the space, so to speak.
I conceive an exhibition as a piece for voices that span several rooms.
I write a score, similar to musical notation, with dense passages, isolated points, repetitions,
echoes, rhythms, clusters and pauses.
Together, they form the sound space.

Silvia Bächli

Since the late 1970s, Swiss artist Silvia Bächli (born 1956, Baden) has committed to drawing as a continuous practice that is deeply dependent on and entangled with her body and its movements, both within the domestic sphere and the landscape. Her drawings can be read as traces of sensorial records –a walk on a field, a body that aches, a poem that triggers– and corporeal gestures –the extension of the arm, the strength of the hand or the rhythm of the brushstroke.

For this exhibition, Bächli has created a score in eight movements for the gallery space: a sequence of rhythmic clusters of drawings or “ensembles” hung at various heights and intervals which, room after room, accrue meaning in their persistent accumulation. Each drawing and each ensemble embody an exquisite act of care and attention, of deep observation and consideration, with the white spaces in the sheets and walls being as important as the coloured shapes.

Bächli insistently works with modest and limiting means: white paper of different sizes, qualities and tones marked with Indian ink, charcoal, gouache or pastels. Her process is sequential as the artist draws on sheets from a pile, one after another, arranging constellations of works on her studio wall that are consecutively interrogated, rearranged and rejected until she discovers something that feels right and surprising.

Partitura sheds light on both the continuity and the progressive changes that occur in Bächli’s work: from her black & white nervy body fragments and introspective female figures to her burnt orange interpretations of the grid structure or her recent expansive coloured surfaces. The exhibition includes das, Bächli’s installation at the Swiss Pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, as well as a wall installation in collaboration with Eric Hattan.

This exhibition is accompanied by a new publication in English and Spanish co-published with Bom Dia Books and designed by Studio Manuel Raeder, that includes newly commissioned texts by poet and critic Quinn Latimer, writer Chris Fite-Wassilak and a conversation between Silvia Bächli and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, curator of the exhibition.