.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Included in Miriam Cahn’s celebrated touring retrospective ICH ALS MENSCH at the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Haus der Kunst, Munich and the Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, Warsaw between 2019 and 2020, gezeichnet 17.6 + 3.7.2018 is a powerful example of her recent practice. Rendered on a human scale, it depicts a single naked woman, a veil-like mask covering her face. Her wounded hands are lifted above her head: a stance that recurs across Cahn’s oeuvre. Her skeletal form glows brightly, even on the brink of dissolution. The work was painted in 2018, the year after Cahn’s inclusion in documenta 14 brought her new waves of international acclaim. It belongs to her series of standing female figures, defined by their totemic presence and frontal address to the viewer. Set against barren landscapes, with only a sliver of sky visible above their heads, these women tell oblique stories of violence, subjugation, resilience and uprising: themes central to Cahn’s practice. With her raised arms, the present figure invokes surrender and defiance in equal measure, challenging us to return her gaze.
Included in last year’s Venice Biennale, and more recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Cahn is one of Switzerland’s most important living artists. She came to prominence during the 1970s and 1980s, after studying at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in Basel. Born to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi persecution in Germany and France, Cahn was deeply attuned to contemporary issues of human suffering and injustice. Inspired by the rise of performance art during her youth, she threw herself into activism, participating in both feminist and peace movements. While protests, petitions and murals dominated her early life as an artist, she eventually began to focus more closely on painting, arriving at her signature large-scale coloured canvases during the 1990s. Over the years her works have addressed issues ranging from the war in former Yugoslavia to the #MeToo movement, violence against Muslim women and—in her mare nostrum cycle—the refugee crisis. At the heart of these interrogations lies the female body: the battleground, Cahn believes, upon which many of the world’s conflicts play out.
Cahn’s women rail against the male gaze. Nonetheless, the artist names Picasso, Munch, Goya and Michelangelo among her sources of inspiration. These influences are borne out in the present work, which invites comparison with Goya’s The Third of May 1808 (1814), as well as the tortured figures of Picasso’s Guernica (1937). At the same time, Cahn’s vivid, hyperreal use of colour and lighting owes much to her engagement with the work of Maria Lassnig, as well as her love of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert). Recalling the oversaturated quality of mass media imagery, the work’s electric red tones emit an otherworldly glow, as if illuminating its subject from within. The figure’s broken body is encircled by a halo of light that seems to propel her into three dimensions. Cahn has spoken of the importance of rendering her figures on a life-like scale, forcing them into direct confrontation with the viewer. Here, her protagonist rises up against the power structures that threaten to condemn her, shining like a beacon against the abyss.
Included in last year’s Venice Biennale, and more recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Cahn is one of Switzerland’s most important living artists. She came to prominence during the 1970s and 1980s, after studying at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in Basel. Born to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi persecution in Germany and France, Cahn was deeply attuned to contemporary issues of human suffering and injustice. Inspired by the rise of performance art during her youth, she threw herself into activism, participating in both feminist and peace movements. While protests, petitions and murals dominated her early life as an artist, she eventually began to focus more closely on painting, arriving at her signature large-scale coloured canvases during the 1990s. Over the years her works have addressed issues ranging from the war in former Yugoslavia to the #MeToo movement, violence against Muslim women and—in her mare nostrum cycle—the refugee crisis. At the heart of these interrogations lies the female body: the battleground, Cahn believes, upon which many of the world’s conflicts play out.
Cahn’s women rail against the male gaze. Nonetheless, the artist names Picasso, Munch, Goya and Michelangelo among her sources of inspiration. These influences are borne out in the present work, which invites comparison with Goya’s The Third of May 1808 (1814), as well as the tortured figures of Picasso’s Guernica (1937). At the same time, Cahn’s vivid, hyperreal use of colour and lighting owes much to her engagement with the work of Maria Lassnig, as well as her love of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert). Recalling the oversaturated quality of mass media imagery, the work’s electric red tones emit an otherworldly glow, as if illuminating its subject from within. The figure’s broken body is encircled by a halo of light that seems to propel her into three dimensions. Cahn has spoken of the importance of rendering her figures on a life-like scale, forcing them into direct confrontation with the viewer. Here, her protagonist rises up against the power structures that threaten to condemn her, shining like a beacon against the abyss.