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Miriam Cahn

Miriam Cahn (* 21. Juli 1949 in Basel) is a swiss artist.

Life

Miriam Cahn is the only daughter of the Jewish numismatician and art dealer Herbert A. Cahn. She visited the graphics class in the Kunstgewebeschule ( school of arts and crafts) in Basel between 1968 and 1973. In the academic year 1978/1979 she was awarded with a studio scholarship in Paris by the city of Basel. In 1982, Cahn was invited to documenta 7, a world art exhibition. She ended up cancelling her participation because the curator Rudi Fuchs intended to place another artist’s works next to Cahn’s against her agreement. In 1984, she received an invitation to the Biennale in Venice. The year after, in 1985, she received a DAAD-scholarship, an artist-in-residence-program from Berlin, that granted her a year of work in Berlin where she ended up staying until 1985. In 2017, her work was exhibited at documenta 14.

Style and works

Miriam Cahn is a figurative painter known for her charcoal and pencil drawings, pastel works, room installations, and performance art. She gained media attention in the winter of 1979/1980 for an illegal nighttime art action, where she drew charcoal murals on the concrete pillars of the Nordtangente (Highway) in Basel.This led to a court case. Many years later, the city tried to make up for the conviction by offering her the chance to design the walls as she envisioned.

In the early stages of her career, she preferred to create her large-scale works on the floor, using her whole body to eliminate the spatial and mental distance. During this time, she produced monumental chalk and charcoal drawings with symbolic depictions of people, animals, and plants. Later, she started making series of drawings with closed eyes.

Miriam Cahn was shaped by the peace and feminist movements, in which she actively participated. Her work frequently explores themes such as the role of women and the representation of war in the mass media. In the 1990s, she engaged in two series focusing on the Gulf War and the conflict in the Balkans.

Reception

Translated by JanaDieCoole

Miriam Cahn’s oevre oscillates between extreme poles of human emotions. Substantially and stylistically, her main topics are the vulnerability of the human body and the attraction between lust and violence. According to Cahn, morality “has no place in art anyway”. Since the Yugoslav Wars, her pictures often thematise the life of people who are fleeing from war. Her more recent series reflect the European migrant crisis. Till Briegleb, a German journalist, placed Cahn’s works in the same rank as those of the artists Maria Lasnig and Maria Dumas. According to him, Cahn’s works complement their collective positions in figurative painting with a “dark love for the instinctive” which makes it necessary that Cahn’s Works is rediscovered.