Silvia Bächli: Partitura

This artist’s first institutional exhibition in Spain premieres new works and sheds light on both the continuity and the progressive changes that occur in her work: from the simple studies of body fragments in black and white to her various interpretations of the grid structure. The exhibition includes works from her presentation at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 as well as a room dedicated to a new series of expansive coloured surfaces, or “colour fields.”

Bächli developed her drawing practice working with modest and limiting means: sheets of white paper manufactured for book printing of different sizes, qualities and tones, and using Indian ink, charcoal, gouache or pastels. The artist takes her body, its movements and the objects that surround her as a starting point to create wall compositions that function like musical scores made up of fragments, intervals, rhythms and silences. Her approach to drawing 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, rejected, until she discovers something that feels right and surprising.

The show is accompanied by a catalogue in English and Spanish (the first catalogue of the artist written in Spanish) designed by Manuel Raeder (BOM DIA). It includes newly commissioned texts by poet and critic Quinn Latimer, writer Chris Fite-Wassilak and a conversation between Silvia Bächli and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz.

The exhibition continues Centro Botín´s commitment to drawing practices, which started with scholarly and curatorial research on Francisco Goya and Manolo Millares and expanded to other regions and contemporary contexts with Julie Mehretu and Juan Muñoz.