Miriam Cahn’s paintings are as oppressive as they are engaging. In pastels or charcoal, she frequently depicts figures that fill the frame within empty, barely defined surroundings. The faces are shadowy reduced, eyes and mouths merely schematic. The bodies, mostly naked, appear lost and ghostlike, as if illuminated by fluorescent light. They are rarely active and when they are, it involves disturbingly simplified, sometimes violent gestures. Loneliness, sexuality, love, violence, and destruction are her subject matter.
By Dimitris Lempesis Photo: Kunsthaus Bregenz Archive
Miriam Cahn is influenced by the performance art of the 1970s, feminist art, and the peace movement. Her figures call for mute identification, sympathy, and a heightened awareness. Sometimes the mountainous landscape of the Upper Engadine is depicted by rugged horizons, overpowering and sublime, and yet, their lines still seem to allude to the human. To coincide with her seventieth birthday in the summer of 2019, Miriam Cahn is presenting “DAS GENAUE HINSCHAUEN”, her first major institutional solo exhibition in Austria at Kunsthaus Bregenz. The artist’s imagery, which has been presented at documenta on numerous occasions, is as oppressive as it is engaging. On the ground floor there are drawings and color photographs. “liebenmüssen-DAS GENAUE HINSCHAUEN” (2018) is a series of scans hanged densely together. These are black and white reproductions of her own paintings, mostly depicting the female gender. The woman as subject of the gaze, the exposure of the female body, and por-nographic voyeuristic curiosity repeatedly appear in this series. Cahn is a feminist, who has titled a collection of her own texts “DAS ZORNIGE SCHREIbEN”. Cahn responds to the current #MeToo debate, to the portrayals of the female gender circulating in the media, but also to art history. As early as 1866, Gustave Courbet painted exposed female genitalia in “The Origin of the World”. “This is a central image for a lot of women making art because it shows that mix, between horny pornography and beauty,” explains Miriam Cahn. Miriam Cahn is not shy of the subject of sexuality. She bases her art on the profane, entering into a dialogue of opposing equivalents with the seemingly sacral architecture of Kunsthaus Bregenz. The first floor comprises works drawn in black chalk on white paper that resemble photographs. Most of these drawings, which Cahn assembles in series, date from the 1980s and early 1990s. In many, their painterly work and movement are visible. The second floor features Miriam Cahn’s large-scale drawings from 1982. The works are dusty. At the time Cahn drew kneeling on the floor, working very rapidly and performatively. They display monumental forms associated with masculinity, such as “doppelkanone”, a series of ships, an oil platform, and the World Trade Center towers in steep perspective. What is striking here is the geometry and the doubling of some forms, the dynamics and spikiness, and above all the stage-like composition as well as the consistent use of a deep black evoking gloomy visions.
Miriam Cahn’s paintings are as oppressive as they are engaging. In pastels or charcoal, she frequently depicts figures that fill the frame within empty, barely defined surroundings. The faces are shadowy reduced, eyes and mouths merely schematic. The bodies, mostly naked, appear lost and ghostlike, as if illuminated by fluorescent light. They are rarely active and when they are, it involves disturbingly simplified, sometimes violent gestures. Loneliness, sexuality, love, violence, and destruction are her subject matter.
