ARTEFIERA 2026

Silvia Bächli was born in Baden, Switzerland, in 1956. She lives and works in Basel.
She works with Galleria Raffaella Cortese since 2013.

Bächli has developed her decade-long drawing practice working on sheets of white paper of different sizes, qualities and tones, and using Indian ink, charcoal, gouache or pastels. Using the body and its movements as a starting point, her work spreads into everything that can be considered part of the realm of feeling. The result is not just painterly moments: the drawings often seem to capture, as if in film stills, a cinematic way of looking at bodies and things or their details, at landscapes, gestures, structures, and processes.

Her latest solo shows include before, Museo Morandi, Bologna (2025); Partitura, Centro Botin, Santander (2024); They’ve Turned into Each Other. Which Is Which?, Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2024);  Silvia Bächli, Museum Langmatt, Baden, Switzerland (2023).

Monica Bonvicini was born in Venice in 1965. She lives and works in Berlin.
She works with Galleria Raffaella Cortese since 2017.

Monica Bonvicini emerged as visual artist and started exhibiting internationally in the mid-1990s. Her multifaceted practice—which investigates the relationship between architecture, power and gender—is translated into works that question the meaning of making art, the ambiguity of language, the limits and possibilities attached to the ideal of freedom, in a dry-humored, direct tone imbued with historical, political and social references.
Her Hurricanes and Other Catastrophes series are large scale black and white drawings recalling images circulating in online media depicting typical North American homes destroyed by disasters that can ultimately be traced back to climate change.

Bonvicini's site-specific installation Come Run With Me, 2024 currently stands on Pinacoteca Agnelli's Pista 500 in Turin. Her works are also currently shown in exhibitions at MAXXI, Rome, Fondazione Merz, Turin and Castello di Rivoli, Turin. Bonvicini won the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Biennale for her project for the Italian Pavillion.

Gabrielle Goliath (b.1983) lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
She works with Galleria Raffaella Cortese since 2024.

Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her art practice, Gabrielle Goliath attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices of possibility perform the world differently. Each of her works convenes a coming-to – a tenuous community – collapsing the presumed remove and privileged subject position of representation (as white, male, heteronormative) and calling for meetings in and across difference, on terms of complicity, relation and love.
In her ongoing and very personal series of drawings and prints Beloved, Goliath summons and celebrates a chorus of both radical and quotidian femme presences: poets, priestesses, activists, artists, parents and prodigies. Beloved is an ode, a work of the heart – a labour of recognition, thanks and love.

Goliath's solo show Personal Accounts is currently shown at MoMA PS1 through March 16, 2026. She has taken part to the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2024.

Born in Scalea, Italy, 1942. Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.
She works with Galleria Raffaella Cortese since 2009.

Drawing from the everyday female consciousness and from an oppressive, censorial dictatorship – as experienced in 1970s and 1980s Brazil – Italian-born Anna Maria Maiolino has produced works steeped in vital force, in a wide range of languages and media throughout her artistic career: from performance to sculpture, from videos to photography, installation and drawing.
Maiolino was involved in Brazil’s 1960s New Figuration movement: her representational prints and drawings from these years were acts of resistance to the national military regime, rising urban inequalities, and culturally ingrained patriarchy. She would later cultivate an interest in spatial and existential issues with a shift towards Minimalism and Conceptualism, creating installations that coaxed interaction between viewer and object.

In 2024 Maiolino has been awarded with the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
Her major solo exhibition travelled from Musée National Picasso-Paris, 2025 to MAAT, Lisbon in 2026.

Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany. She lives and works in New York.
She works with Galleria Raffaella Cortese since 2001.

Smith is a New York-based artist and a leading figure in the international art world. The human form, especially the female body, became central to her work in the 1980s. She began to focus on the themes of loss and death through her depiction of the body’s internal components. These presented anxieties surrounding the maternal body and the notion of the body as a receptacle for incorporeal components such as knowledge, belief and storytelling. In recent years, Smith’s work has evolved to incorporate animals, domestic objects and narrative tropes from classical mythology and folk tales. Her career, spanning more than three decades, is characterized by great sperimentation with techniques and materials: from hair and latex to beeswax and gold to a diverse body of media that includes painting, photography, bookmaking, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking.