Silvia Bächli makes subtle and non-invasive two-dimensional interventions, creating conditions for encounters with her works that transcend their material boundaries and become environments. Her work also represents bodily echoes, where line and flatness synthesize basic expressive elements. In the interplay between drawing and architecture, visual voids are emphasized yet charged with meaning—spaces that contain the memory of the artist's gestures, latent in the invisible continuity of harmonic dimensions and the rhythm of her strokes.
Her creative process, almost ritual in character, unfolds in successive phases: an initial spontaneous production of images with elementary forms, a rigorous selection of the most essential drawings, and finally the composition of "ensembles"—wall constellations in which individual drawings integrate into a larger structure. In these configurations, the white of the wall does not operate as a neutral background but as an active agent that binds the works together in an open, organic atmosphere, in the same way that silence articulates music.
The exhibition displays—designed by the artist—borrow strategies from installation art, becoming key components in Bächli's work that emphasize the importance of the viewer's physical experience within the space: immediate, multidimensional, present, and poetic.
Her practice is grounded in a radical understanding of drawing as both a tool for thought and a spatial device. Rather than operating as a mere representational medium, drawing unfolds in her work as a perceptive exercise, a way of constructing time, memory, and attention. In this sense, Bächli's work expands the field of drawing into spatial composition and embodied experience, elegantly questioning the conventional boundaries between performance, body, artwork, and space.
Silvia Bächli trained at the École d'Arts Appliqués in Basel and subsequently at the École Supérieure d'Arts Visuels in Geneva. In 1981 she co-founded the itinerant alternative space Filiale Basel. From 1993 to 2016 she taught at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe. In 2009 she represented Switzerland at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Among her most notable solo exhibitions are Brombeeren at the Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich, 2014), Shift at the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (2019), Along Long Lines at the Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst (Bremen, 2022), They've Turned into Each Other. Which Is Which? at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2024), Partitura at the Centro Botín (Santander, 2024), and before at the Museo Morandi (Bologna, 2025). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Fondation Beyeler (Basel, 2019), the Kunstmuseum Basel (2023, 2024–2025), the Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2010), and the Albertina (Vienna, 2015). Her awards include the Meret Oppenheim Prize (2003), the Contemporary Drawing Prize of the Fondation Daniel et Florence Guerlain (2007), the Hans-Thoma-Preis (2007), and the Kulturpreis of the City of Basel (2014). Her work is held in collections including MoMA (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung (Munich), the Neue Pinakothek (Munich), the MAMCO (Geneva), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, and the Fundación Botín (Santander), among others.