My work entails approaching something that I don’t know well and finding out about it by doing.

Silvia Bächli

 Silvia Bächli, born in 1956 in Baden, Switzerland, and now based in Basel, has developed her drawing oeuvre since the late 1970s in a manner that is both cautious and consistent. Her expressive approach to physicality developed over time to an almost introspective view of reality. Everyday perception forms the starting point of Bächli’s artistic process during which the artist appropriates things, so to speak, to give them an autonomous form in drawing. Starting in 1984, Bächli began combining small-format drawings into Ensembles, multipart wall compositions. Since 2001 she created large-format paper works with overlapping, filigree lineaments; in recent years she has become more prudent about the relationship between the areas of color and the background.

Bächli’s quiet work is now appreciated all over the world and has been exhibited in important museums such as the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Geneva (2006), Centre Pompidou in Paris (2007), the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich (2014), the Museum Weserburg in Bremen (2022), and the Centro Botin in Santander (2024). In 2009 she represented Switzerland at the fifty-third Venice Biennale.

The exhibition in Winterthur, entitled They’ve Turned into Each Other. Which Is Which? after a line in a poem by American poet Elizabeth Bishop, takes works from the series Lidschlag (Blink of an Eye) as its starting point and offers a comprehensive overview of Bächli’s multifaceted oeuvre, with a series of small sculptures that she is presenting in Switzerland for the first time.

A picture book conceived by Bächli, including her photographs of the exhibition, will be published in conjunction with this show.

Curators: Konrad Bitterli, David Schmidhauser