Peter Freeman, Inc., is pleased to announce an exhibition of new and recent drawings by Silvia Bächli, her third solo show with the gallery and the first in New York in four years.
Balanced precariously between abstraction and representation, Bächli’s imagery is always rooted in reality—motions, a space, a feeling—then distilled into an essence, a whisper, a subversive illustration of its source. Motifs recur, and become a language in which profound blank spaces are heard as loudly as marks, lines, sweeping gesture and wash. The presence of the artist’s body is felt—in stops and starts of the line, the varying pressure of the brush, and the build-up of density on the paper; sometimes there is a sense of a light touch, and elsewhere a great intensity.
For this exhibition, Bächli arranges the sheets in a way that guides the viewer back and forth between works, knitting the space in constellation rather than a linear route. The drawings feel as though they are communicating—but the message is elusive. Language hovers—as though one can't quite find the right words to describe what is seen—like a word on the tip of the tongue: sensed, but not yet articulated.
Among the many new works on view will be a series Bächli has recently begun called rhomb [nets], most made up of two or four large sheets visually “sewn” together by Bächli’s mark-making. Zig-zagging lines from various points on the sheets approach one another, but miss when they meet at the pages’ centers, so that the lines are joined but fragmented. They appear like broken mirrors reassembled—each embodying a repair of sorts, yet also something new that had never existed as such. After working exclusively in black-and-white for years, in 2008 while Bächli was in Iceland, seeing the colored houses and roofs in the white snow inspired her to reconsider color in relation to her practice, a development reflected in many of the new works on view here.
The exhibition’s title comes from the first lines of the English translation of "it," the revered poem by Danish poet Inger Christensen.
Born in Baden, Switzerland in 1956, Bächli lives and works in Basel. She represented Switzerland at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Her work is currently on view in a solo exhibition at Frac Franche-Comté, Besançon (through 18 October 2015) and the group show “Drawing Now” at Albertina, Vienna (through 11 October 2015). Other recent solo exhibitions include Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, Genève (2014), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2014), MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2013), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2012), Kunsthalle Nürnberg (2011), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007), Museu Serralves, Porto (2007), and Mamco, Geneva (2006). She has been awarded numerous prizes and honors, including the 2014 Kulturpreis der Stadt Basel. Important books on her work include Silvia Bächli: Brombeeren (Munich: Pinakothek der Moderne, 2014) and Lidschlag – How It Looks/ Works, 1983-2003 (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2004), among many others. Her work is in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art; Fogg Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge; Kunstmuseum Basel; Kunstmuseum St.Gallen; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Mamco), Geneva; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.
A reception for the artist will be held Thursday 10 September from 6 to 8 pm. For reproduction requests, interviews with the artist and general inquiries, please contact the gallery at 212-966-5154 or info@peterfreemaninc.com.
