Miriam Cahn

Basel 1949

By: Isabel Tejeda

The Swiss painter Miriam Cahn studied art in her hometown from 1968 to 1975. Her first public project, Being a Woman in My Public Role, came a few years later in 1979. Since that first work, an intervention in the streets of Basel, Cahn has used drawing in black and white, with pencil, charcoal or pastel, and working with huge formats, a medium that she prefers for its direct impact. From then onwards, Chan has focused her work on one of maxims of 1970’s militant feminism, “the personal is political”, which she acknowledges was highly influential on her work, although less explicit than in the activist work of some of her peers. Her work questions her role on the art scene starting from the fact of being a woman; in this regard, she uses the iconography of the sexual organs of distressed and sometimes abused characters. From a linguistic point of view, one can see the stylistic influence of classic expressionism within the neo-current that prevailed in the 1980s in her work.

In 1998, Cahn received the Käthe Kollwitz Prize from the Berlin Akademie der Künste and the Meret Oppenheim in 2005, awarded by the Office Fédéral Suisse de la Culture. She has exhibited at the Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, Switzerland, 1983); the Musée La Chaux-de-Fonds (La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 1984); the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (Baden-Baden, Germany, 1985); the Kunstmuseum (Bonn, Germany, 1985); the Gemeentemuseum (Arnhem, Netherlands, 1988); the Kunstverein Hannover (Hannover, Germany, 1988); the Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 1992, 1995); the ”la Caixa” Foundation (Madrid, 2003); the Kirchner Museum (Davos, Switzerland, 2006); the Badischer Kunstverein (Kalsruhe, Germany, 2012); and the FRAC Auvergne (Auvergne, France, 2018), as well as at other international museums.