Reduced to the Essentials
Interview with Silvia Bächli

Bence Kala

[1] Silvia Bächli’s exhibition ‘far apart – close together’ at the Kunstmuseum St.Gallen was open to the public from 11 February to 13 May 2012.

BK: Your exhibition was titled They’ve Turned into Each Other. Which Is Which? Could you explain the title’s significance? Why did you choose it?

Silvia Bächli: My individual drawings are rarely given titles — I save this difficult search for entire exhibitions. When looking for titles, I like to read texts, hoping to find the right combination of words. In this case, I found two lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem” — I immediately knew this had to be it. It describes the way in which my work is created.

BK: Did you have any contact with Winterthur before the exhibition? What do you think of this institution?

SB: For years, Kunst Museum Winterthur has been one of the places where I regularly visit the exhibitions. Konrad Bitterli has been the director of the museum for a few years now — I have known him for a long time. When he was still a curator at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, we worked on my exhibition far apart — close together (2012). [1]The nine spaces in Winterthur — built 25 years ago as a temporary structure by the architects Gigon/Gyer — are the most beautiful museum spaces I know. Simple, clear… What a pleasure it was when Konrad Bitterli invited me!

BK: Walking through Kunst Museum Winterthur’s rooms of twentieth-century art (e.g., artworks by Hans Arp, Paul Klee, Jo Baer and Kurt Schwitters) felt like a warming up before entering your temporary exhibition. Is there a particular piece from this collection that inspires you?

SB: In Winterthur, when you come to the first floor, there is a Morandi room, and later in your walk through the museum, the works from Sophie Taeuber-Arp would be an obvious choice for me.

BK: Your paintings have become more colourful since your exhibition at the Venice Biennale[2] In your latest work, exhibited in Winterthur, rose colours have emerged (which also fill larger fields in the spaces of the drawings/paintings[3]), and I also saw coloured oil pastel drawings there for the first time… What is your relationship to colour in general?

SB: I only did black and white drawings in my early years. I used all kinds of black and white techniques (except charcoal and pencil), oil pastels, gouache, ink, ink and acrylic. Since 2008, I have also been working in colour, mostly using gouache. It’s like an orchestra; new instruments and new tones are added, and the sound spectrum is expanded.

BK: It seems to me that the act of selecting is an essential part of your work… At your exhibition in Winterthur, a room showcased pictures from a twenty-year interval from 1983 to 2003, one from each year. Could you please talk about the selection process?

SB: My work is an approach to something I don’t know exactly and only find out by doing. So, I need a lot of attempts and wrong turns before I arrive at something I’m satisfied with.

You can hardly make any corrections when working on paper — but there’s another paper on the pile, another attempt. I work from moments that have remained in my memory. I start by putting the first lines on the paper, so there is a vague idea at the beginning, but I am happy to be taken into ‘new territory’.

My working method is as follows: I colour sheets of paper without slowing down and avoid making an immediate judgement as to whether it is good or bad. Only the next day, with a bit of distance, do I look at the drawings very critically and throw a lot of them away. The good ones and the ones that annoy/disturb me hang on the wall. What happens to them over the next few weeks? Will they change? How do they relate to each other?

I have an “A” box for the good drawings. The “C” drawings end up in the bin, and a “B” box for doubtful cases (could be “A” or “C”). All sheets with technical mistakes are thrown away (e.g., too much water in the brush results in a puddle in the wrong place, or the colour has been painted over too often and is, therefore, boggy). A jumble of too many ideas on one sheet is also thrown away — it lacks clarity. And sheets that know too much are thrown away. Good drawings are plain, simple, and reduced to the essentials; they have breadth.

BK: You work mostly on paper…what does this material mean to you?

SB: Perhaps I have already answered this: working on paper requires no preparatory work, such as priming the canvas. Paper is ideal for trying things out. (As long as you have plenty of paper available). I need paper for book printing, so I order it from wholesalers once a year.

BK: What do you think about the relationship between image and text? Why do you insert words into the fabric of the image?

SB: Pictures float through my head while I’m working — but also words and sounds I hear — or my back feels tired — or an insect dances through the room — everything can be put on paper.

BK: Photographs of your cardboard models play a crucial role in the exhibition catalogue. What is the role of the models? Have you made similar models before every exhibition?

SB: If I’m invited to an exhibition, I first ask for a floor plan. Then, I visit the room(s). What is the light, the floor, and the doors/passages like? How do you walk through the rooms as a visitor?

Back home, I usually build a simple model out of paper and cardboard on a scale of 1:10. I also print out the drawings on this scale. They are my actors. With a few simple changes, they play a different part. This way, I can set up the whole exhibition and rearrange it until I am sure that this combination and choreography is spot on.

At the same time, I hang the originals on the wall, test the distances and heights, and incorporate good combinations into the model — so I alternate between the originals on the wall and the reduction in the model.

The model and the photos of the model serve as a memory aid so I can compare different exhibition ideas with each other.

Once I have found my choreography for the exhibition, I measure all the distances and heights of the drawings and take these hanging plans to the museum to set them up.

BK: How does the space you work in affect your art? Are the works always created in the studio? Which was your favourite studio space?

SB: Spaces are the basis of my work. Space and drawings together are the work. The walls are part of the work.

I always make the drawings in the studio. I need very little: a room with light, a table and a chair, water, paint, brushes, pens and a pile of paper. I need tape and pins to hang them up.

And, yes, of course, the space influences the work. In the Langmatt Museum, a 19th-century villa in Baden, I had a historic room with a skylight, fabric-covered grey walls and a mahogany floor.[4] I was allowed to borrow a piece of grey fabric wallpaper for the preparations — but it wasn’t until I was there that it became clear that my colourful fields and the imposing room were a good match.

The same drawings are now hanging in the exhibition at the Centro Botín in Santander, in a neutral 21st-century museum venue with light beige walls — it looks completely different.

BK: Do you need solitude in the studio? Do you have a studio ritual?

SB: I work alone in the studio. Nobody can help me there, so I don’t have any assistants. There is no special ritual. I come into the studio, choose the paper and the size I want to start with and get started.

BK: What does white evoke for you, the emptiness of the sheet, the immaculacy of the wall?

SB: Go on and try!

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Special thanks to Konrad Bitterli and Kunst Museum Winterthur; Markus Stegmann and Museum Villa Langmatt; Lars Müller Publishers Zürich; Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milano; Peter Freeman Inc. New York; Maisterravalbuena, Madrid.

For more, please visit: www.silviabaechli.ch