Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

an der grenze

Image caption
MIRIAM CAHN

an der grenze

  • 2015
  • Pencil on paper
  • 60 x 90 cm
  • Cat. D_366
  • Acquired in 2017
By:
Yolanda Romero Gómez

Miriam Cahn embarked on her artistic career in the 1970s with a series of black and white drawings that affirm her approach to drawing as a work in itself and not as a sketch for oil painting. Drawing provides an immediacy that other mediums do not; it is simple, direct and, in her case, that speed of execution turns the act of drawing into a performance, with a strong physical content. Indeed, her characteristic way of drawing on the floor, squatting, even with her eyes closed, affords her a freedom that would be difficult to achieve painting on canvas.

Her works in the Banco de España Collection are typical of her themes and means of expression, marked by the conflicts of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia and by the terror triggered after other wars in the Middle East and Syria. The three drawings are part of this theme, and are based on images of violence and the contemporary exoduses that the different media report daily. Women and children fleeing, scared silhouettes, turning to look at what they are leaving for the last time; haunted figures that look at us with the horror of the unknown and the stupor of what they are leaving behind. Images in black and white, surrounded by nothingness or enveloped in colours that create an overwhelming space. The works have general titles, written in lower case, such as an der grenze, meaning ‘at the frontier’ – at any frontier – or are untitled, eliminating the anecdotes and extending the drama to any part of the contemporary world.

Thus, Miriam Cahn’s work is undeniably akin to the work of Francisco de Goya, who was one of the first to denounce the brutality of war and its impact on the most vulnerable through his art.

Yolanda Romero Gómez

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Miriam Cahn
Basel 1949

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.

Isabel Tejeda

 
«At eye level» (Kiel, 2016). «(UN)COMMON VALUES. Two Corporate Collections of Contemporary Art», National Bank of Belgium (Brussels, 2022).
Anette Hüsch Miriam Cahn. At Eye Level, Kiel, Kunstalle zu Kiel, 2016. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.