From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, Miriam Cahn shunned painting as an act of feminist resistance against the Western art world’s male, Abstract and Minimalist Zeitgeist. Painting had passed its art historical prime by the 1990s, and Cahn picked up the brush at the age of forty-five. The artist explores what she believes to be the innate treachery, brutality, and beauty in the human condition, always in response to current events and with a staunchly progressive bend. Cahn’s imagery subsumes the viewer into nightmarish dreamscapes that evoke the violence felt on a human, bodily level as the result of global policy, war, and oppression. For the Biennale Arte 2022, Cahn exhibits one room installation titled unser süden sommer 2021, 5.8.2021 (2021) consisting of twenty-eight new works, including thirteen paintings, nine mixed media drawings, and six artist notebooks. In her drawings and paintings, objects become anthropomorphised as questionable appendages. Birthing imagery, gender-bending beings, erect phalluses and overtly sexual conduct are returning subject matter. Cahn’s works address crises and tragedies like the Persian Gulf War, #MeToo movement, World Trade Center attacks, and the Yugoslav Wars in a covert and unspectacular way. She does not glamourise trauma or virtue signal. Rather, she allows for ambiguity and emotive mark-making to take the lead.
Isabella Achenbach
