Miriam Cahn (1949)

Professions: Painter

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  Schlechter Tag, 1985 (fünfteilig)

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  MIRIAM CAHN 1949

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  Cahn, Miriam1949 Basel Schauen.

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  Cahn, Miriam1949 Basel Schönheit.

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Miriam Cahn Biography

(b Basle, 21 July 1949). Swiss draughtswoman and painter. She studied at the Gewerbeschule in Basle from 1968 to 1975 and made her first public appearance in 1979 with a ‘night action’, Being a Woman Is my Public Role (see 1983 exh. cat.), which consisted of personal, intimate signs drawn on the anonymous concrete walls of the motorway leading to Basle. Her concern with the image of women in the male social and artistic tradition, and with a search for specifically female signs, led to two series, Classical Love (exh. Basle, 1983, see 1986 exh. cat.) and Wild Love (exh. 1984, see 1985 exh. cat., pp. 22–3). In these she presented the male world in the form of drawings of rockets, war and merchant ships, skyscrapers, computers and pornographic images, while symbolizing the female world by tables, menstruation houses and faces with wide open mouths. Her works are always shown in groups so as to stress the open-ended and incomplete quality of the process, which leads to further questions. Cahn sought to express her psychological and physical disposition in her drawings by working on the floor with her eyes closed. In a later series of installations, Relations (exh. Wiesbaden, 1989/90, see 1990 exh. cat. pp. 98–9), she juxtaposed traditional oil paintings representing such structures as nuclear power plants and chemical factories with landscapes, plants and animals in the form of drawings made with black chalk dust. As in her earlier works she made use of confrontation and contradiction, while also demonstrating the close relationship between growth and destruction.

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