Born in Lisbon in 1972, Leonor Antunes lives and works in Berlin. She is known for her expansive installations, which provide many-faceted explorations of the formal idioms of modern art. She represents Portugal at this year’s Venice Biennale.

Following comprehensive research, Leonor Antunes creates works that reference practitioners from the fields of design, architecture and art of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, such as Franca Helg (1920-1989) or Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992). Next to the social and historical context, Leonor Antunes is interested more particularly in the material characteristics and the composition of sculpture in an architectural setting.

The work of Bauhaus artist Anni Albers (1899-1994) is a recurring source of inspiration for Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes. Anni Albers studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau. As a woman, she was barred from the architecture course, which is why she enrolled in the weaving workshop. She developed a modern language of weaving, combining the technique with architectural thought and concepts. Leonor Antunes has taken up these techniques and created a new work for the exhibition «Resonating Spaces», a linoleum floor piece based on a work by Anni Albers and one of her own works: Anni#19 is now held in the Beyeler Collection.

Silvia Bächli was born in Baden (Switzerland) in 1956. She mainly lives in Basel, where she studied at the School of Design in the 1970s. Her artistic practice has always centred on the medium of drawing. Yet her works are not bounded by their respective format, in as much as she arranges them in room-filling installations. As she explained in an interview: “Good drawings are larger than the format defined by the paper’s edge”. She has received numerous awards, such as the 2014 Basler Kulturpreis. An exhibition of her works was presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007, and in 2009 she represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale.

For more than a decade, Silvia Bächli has been producing large works on paper, increasingly departing from references to figurative motifs and giving free reign to her fascination with lines. Her drawings mainly feature brushstrokes, arrangements of lines and grid structures. “Drawings are actions. Lines tell stories. What are these lines doing?”, asks the artist, exploring the strength of lines, the pressure and physical exertion used to trace them, the intensity of their colour or the way in which the paper absorbs them.

For "Resonating Spaces", Silvia Bächli created so-called “Ensembles” of her works from the past ten years, set in relation to the Fondation Beyeler’s exhibition space. Blanks within and in between the drawings, as well as the drawings’ relation to one another and with the surrounding space, all play a decisive role.