Miriam Cahn

Swiss, b.1949

About

Works online

Past exhibition at Sifang

Miriam Cahn was born in 1949 in Basel, Switzerland. She is above all a figurative painter but, right from the start, she has associated her artistic project and its pictorial expression with other exploratory processes, such as performance or installations. After her training at the Gewerbeschule in Basel, where from 1968 to 1973 she took lessons in graphic art, she rose to renown in 1979 with an artistic action, consisting in placing murals along a motorway bridge. In 1981, the art historian and museum curator Jean-Christophe Ammann invited her to take part in a group show at the Kunsthalle in Basel then, two years later, for her first solo exhibition. In 1984, she represented her country at the Venice Biennale.

In Miriam Cahn’s work can be seen the influence of the feminist movements and thought of the 1970s, and then the 1980s. In particular, right at the beginning of her artistic career, she involved her own body in her work, by painting on the ground, on her studio floor, sometimes naked or with her eyes blindfolded, so as to reduce the influence of the mind on the creative process. For this Swiss artist, any depicted body radiates beyond its physical condition – whether it be men and women, or animals and vegetation. Even a house can become embodied thanks to her brush, becoming as though inhabited, just like the fragment of a body, or female genitalia: they are all inhabited by a force which is at once physical and mental, sensual and emotional. Miriam Cahn places the body and its expression in an aura of profoundly emotive, subjective colours. Often bright, these colours become emotions. From the depths of her canvases, or from the strokes of her charcoal, she brings out what has been buried: concealed secrets and forbidden sensations. Her work evokes bodily desire, just as much as it does the violence that bodies undergo.

Miriam Cahn lives and works in Stampa. Many solo exhibitions have been devoted to her in Switzerland and Germany. In 2003, she exhibited at the Fundación La Caixa in Madrid then, in 2014, at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris, with “körperlich /corporel”, the artist’s first major retrospective in France. She participated to the Documenta 14 with a large selection of paintings and drawings in Kassel and in Athens. In 2019, three majors institutions organized together three important exhibitions in Haus der Kunst, Munich, Kunstmuseum Bern, and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In 2019, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid planed to dedicated to important solo show to Miriam Cahn. She has received a number of prestigious prizes, such as the 1998 Käthe Kollwitz Prize in Berlin or, in 2005, the Prix Meret Oppenheim and in 2013 the Baseler Kunstpreis in Switzerland.

Even if Miriam Cahn’s artistic work is rooted in the 1970s and 1980s, her pictorial language remains radically singular, distant from the abstract credo of the era, while leaving performance behind. In her determined approach to bodily expression, Miriam Cahn has for some years – quite clearly as a challenge – been confronting that most physical of all artistic skills: sculpting wood and, to be more precise, huge tree trunks. She saws, removes bark, carves and digs, in a bodily confrontation with trees, so as to be able to “penetrate surgically” these trunks, as she puts it, and go “within their bodies”.