Miriam Cahn valuation
Swiss painter of naked, glowing, defenceless bodies, in pictures shaken by war, flight and violence.
Miriam Cahn was born in Basel in 1949 and studied at the Schule für Gestaltung there from 1968 to 1973, when she became involved in the feminist and anti-nuclear movements.
What a work by Miriam Cahn is worth
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Bio
Miriam Cahn was born in Basel in 1949 and studied at the Schule für Gestaltung there from 1968 to 1973, when she became involved in the feminist and anti-nuclear movements. Her early work was drawing in black chalk and charcoal, made on the floor, on large sheets and in public: in 1979 she covered the concrete of the Nordtangente, a motorway bridge under construction in Basel, with drawings and the words mein frausein ist mein öffentlicher teil — my being a woman is my public part — which led to a court case. In 1984 she represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale. From the 1990s colour came in, mostly in oil, painted quickly and in series, in acid, glowing tones: figures without clothes and often without features, animals, houses, mountains and atomic clouds, and bodies caught up in war and flight, many made in response to the news. Her work is in the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern and the Reina Sofía, and she lives and works in the Bregaglia valley in Graubünden.
She works fast and in series, so there is a large output of paintings, drawings and watercolours, and the early black chalk and charcoal drawings on paper are a distinct and fragile category: the medium smudges and the large sheets are hard to frame and move. Her works are dated precisely, often to the day, on the front or the reverse, and that date is how a work is identified. Meyer Riegger and Jocelyn Wolff are among her galleries.
Basel, the Nordtangente and documenta
She withdrew from documenta 7 in 1982 in a dispute over her space and returned to documenta in 2017. In 2023 France's Conseil d'État rejected a demand that her painting fuck abstraction!, about the massacre at Bucha in Ukraine, be removed from her exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Retrospectives in 2019 at the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Reina Sofía were followed by READING DUST at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2024, the year she received the Goslarer Kaiserring.
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