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Lot Essay
“Cahn’s figures are often surrounded by a shadowy, atmospheric band of color, a diffuse aura that mediates between the motifs and the colorful non-figurative backgrounds…[She] creates transitions rather than borders; diffusion rather than difference.” - Jörg Scheller
Swiss painter Miriam Cahn creates an as yet unimagined world in WAS MICH ANSCHAUT, 02.10.2016. The title, which translates as “What Looks at Me,” combines a mysterious and enigmatic phrase with the precision of a date. This strategy, reminiscent of On Kawara’s iconic Today series paintings, resonates differently with this quasi-figurative, quasi-abstract painting. It is as if Cahn seeks to give form to ghosts, to ask them to follow the rules of time and space. These figures, so alien and foreboding, look at the artist and at us. We cannot know the meaning of their gaze, but there is no denying its entrancing power. One is reminded of Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt by God for her lack of faith. Likewise, Cahn’s mournful creatures are both formless and humanoid.
A substantial painting at over three feet by five feet, WAS MICH ANSCHAUT, 02.10.2016 is populated by four figures, or perhaps three figures and a shadow. Their bodies are atmospherically rendered with hazy pinks and reds, with one apparition donning a punk green hairdo. Cahn builds the canvas up from swaths of pigment that remind us of the raw flesh at our cores. The sky portends a storm; whispers of orange, purple, and green meld into a rain-laden horizon.
Cahn has an enviable ability to blend dreamscapes with bodies, “Cahn’s figures are often surrounded by a shadowy, atmospheric band of color, a diffuse aura that mediates between the motifs and the colorful non-figurative backgrounds…[She] creates transitions rather than borders; diffusion rather than difference” (J. Scheller, “Miriam Cahn’s Fragmented Bodies,” Frieze, November 9, 2012, https://www.frieze.com/article/miriam-cahn-2012-review). WAS MICH ANSCHAUT, 02.10.2016 represents the greatest transition of all—from life to death.
Of a 1993 exhibition, critic Hans Rudolf Reust writes, “Entire figures breathed in erotic proximity and at a distance, from the shadows. The gestural in these drawings was not the expression of internal agitation, but, rather, the trace of a physical struggle with paper” (H.R. Reust, “Miriam Cahn: Galerie Stampa,” Artforum, Summer 1993, https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/199306/miriam-cahn-56036). Cahn undoubtedly wins this struggle, and our unease might be mollified by the surety with which she handles the canvas. She leads us into this unknown space, an act of generosity that empowers us to visit the eerie expanse. Cahn’s paintings have been celebrated for this fearlessness since her first solo exhibition in 1981, and this work was included in her 2019 solo survey at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.
Her work is included in important public collections, like the Pinault Collection, Paris, Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has mounted numerous solo shows, including an exhibition at the Fondazione ICA Milano, Italy last year. One of her most affecting works, WAS MICH ANSCHAUT, 02.10.2016. is a fever dream made real by her skilled application of paint. The intentions of Cahn’s ghostly abstractions are unsure, but given her longstanding activist commitments, we can be confident that they speak to what haunts us, and what looks at us from the depths of history.
Swiss painter Miriam Cahn creates an as yet unimagined world in WAS MICH ANSCHAUT, 02.10.2016. The title, which translates as “What Looks at Me,” combines a mysterious and enigmatic phrase with the precision of a date. This strategy, reminiscent of On Kawara’s iconic Today series paintings, resonates differently with this quasi-figurative, quasi-abstract painting. It is as if Cahn seeks to give form to ghosts, to ask them to follow the rules of time and space. These figures, so alien and foreboding, look at the artist and at us. We cannot know the meaning of their gaze, but there is no denying its entrancing power. One is reminded of Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt by God for her lack of faith. Likewise, Cahn’s mournful creatures are both formless and humanoid.
A substantial painting at over three feet by five feet, WAS MICH ANSCHAUT, 02.10.2016 is populated by four figures, or perhaps three figures and a shadow. Their bodies are atmospherically rendered with hazy pinks and reds, with one apparition donning a punk green hairdo. Cahn builds the canvas up from swaths of pigment that remind us of the raw flesh at our cores. The sky portends a storm; whispers of orange, purple, and green meld into a rain-laden horizon.
Cahn has an enviable ability to blend dreamscapes with bodies, “Cahn’s figures are often surrounded by a shadowy, atmospheric band of color, a diffuse aura that mediates between the motifs and the colorful non-figurative backgrounds…[She] creates transitions rather than borders; diffusion rather than difference” (J. Scheller, “Miriam Cahn’s Fragmented Bodies,” Frieze, November 9, 2012, https://www.frieze.com/article/miriam-cahn-2012-review). WAS MICH ANSCHAUT, 02.10.2016 represents the greatest transition of all—from life to death.
Of a 1993 exhibition, critic Hans Rudolf Reust writes, “Entire figures breathed in erotic proximity and at a distance, from the shadows. The gestural in these drawings was not the expression of internal agitation, but, rather, the trace of a physical struggle with paper” (H.R. Reust, “Miriam Cahn: Galerie Stampa,” Artforum, Summer 1993, https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/199306/miriam-cahn-56036). Cahn undoubtedly wins this struggle, and our unease might be mollified by the surety with which she handles the canvas. She leads us into this unknown space, an act of generosity that empowers us to visit the eerie expanse. Cahn’s paintings have been celebrated for this fearlessness since her first solo exhibition in 1981, and this work was included in her 2019 solo survey at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.
Her work is included in important public collections, like the Pinault Collection, Paris, Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has mounted numerous solo shows, including an exhibition at the Fondazione ICA Milano, Italy last year. One of her most affecting works, WAS MICH ANSCHAUT, 02.10.2016. is a fever dream made real by her skilled application of paint. The intentions of Cahn’s ghostly abstractions are unsure, but given her longstanding activist commitments, we can be confident that they speak to what haunts us, and what looks at us from the depths of history.