Silvia Bächli: Before | Museo Morandi, Bolonia
Conceived for the Museo Morandi on the occasion of ART CITY Bologna 2025 and Arte Fiera, before proposed a dialogue between Silvia Bächli's abstract and poetic visual language and the legacy of Giorgio Morandi.
For the exhibition, the artist selected eight still lifes from the museum's permanent collection, presenting them alongside a series of new works created specifically for the project. This encounter between past and present highlighted the affinities between the two artists, whose practices share a commitment to essentiality and an ability to evoke profound emotional resonance through the simplicity of forms and gestures.
The title, before, refers to a temporal and processual dimension common to both artists. Working with raw pigments and the pencil marks left on his studio table, Morandi meticulously prepared his "actors"—bottles and everyday objects—before arriving at a final composition. Similarly, Bächli devotes an essential part of her practice to this "before": moving, observing and rearranging elements in space in search of the precise balance before bringing a work to completion.
During a visit to Casa Morandi, Bächli discovered the extraordinary richness of the Bolognese master's palette, a quality she had not fully perceived through works seen in museums or reproduced in publications. Amid seemingly neutral tones, vivid nuances emerge—a brilliant green, a warm ochre or a blue barely discernible within the shadows—which directly informed the works created for the exhibition. In these works, vibrant fields of colour intertwine with delicate tonalities, evoking the same chromatic subtlety that characterises Morandi's still lifes.
