MIRIAM CAHN

Early Years

Born in Basel in 1949, Miriam Cahn was raised in a Jewish family shaped by the trauma of the Second World War. Her parents, both displaced by Nazi persecution, instilled in her a deep awareness of political violence and injustice. Cahn studied at the Basel School of Applied Arts between 1968 and 1975, developing a strong foundation in draughtsmanship while rejecting traditional modes of instruction.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she began producing large-scale charcoal drawings in public spaces, often crawling across the paper as part of a performative drawing process. Her early alignment with feminist movements and opposition to nuclear proliferation informed much of her conceptual and visual language. Cahn currently lives and works in the Swiss village of Stampa in the Alps.

Artworks

Miriam Cahn’s artworks foreground the human figure as a vessel of vulnerability and resistance. Through expressive colour and simplified form, she captures emotional and physical trauma, inflected by themes of war, migration, motherhood, and sexual violence.

Performative Drawings and Early Activism

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Miriam Cahn developed her unique approach to drawing by engaging her entire body in the process. Crawling across paper laid directly on the floor, she created large-scale charcoal works that embodied endurance and confrontation. These performances—such as the seminal Körperzeichnungen series—were often staged in public places and aligned with feminist and anti-nuclear protests. Drawing was not merely a visual act for Cahn but a physical and political gesture, asserting the body as both subject and instrument of resistance in contemporary art.

Pastel Figures and Feminist Imagery

Cahn’s work in the 1990s marked a shift toward pastel and watercolour, with saturated yet soft hues used to depict ambiguous human and animal forms. In works such as Ich als Tier (I as Animal), she explores the liminal space between species, gender, and identity. Her figures—often nude, androgynous, or in fetal poses—evoke motherhood, trauma, and sexuality without didacticism. These images are deliberately open-ended, embodying both beauty and violence. Through this ambiguity, Cahn critiques patriarchal narratives, reimagining the female body as a site of power, memory, and transformation.

Confronting War and Displacement

In more recent years, Cahn’s art has turned increasingly toward global politics, particularly the human consequences of war and forced migration. Paintings such as flüchtende (Fleeing, 2017) and anschauen (Looking, 2021) feature spectral children, amputated limbs, and faces contorted in fear or silence. Rendered in acidic pinks, reds, and greys, these works confront the visual language of news media, reasserting the emotional and physical toll of violence on real bodies. Rather than depict literal events, Cahn distills their psychic residue—suggesting that to look at these figures is to confront collective complicity and indifference.

Awards and Accolades

• Goslarer Kaiserring Prize (2024)
• 14th Rubens Prize from the city of Siegen (2022)
• Swiss Grand Prix (2016)
• Prix Culturel Manor (2001)
• Käthe Kollwitz Prize (1998)
• Meret Oppenheim Prize (1997)

Exhibitions

Miriam Cahn has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important institutions. A selection of important exhibitions is provided below.

Solo Exhibitions

• Reading Dust, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2024)
• Ma pensée sérielle, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2023)
• GEZEICHNET, Fondazione ICA, Milan (2022)
• Ten thousand things, Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing (2020)
• I AS HUMAN, Kunstmuseum Bern (2019). Travelled to Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2019); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2019); and Kunsthaus Bregenz (2019), among others.

Group Exhibitions

• The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale (2022)
• Tuymans / Cahn / Oba, Pinault Collection, Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2021)
• 21st Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (2018)
• koennteichsein, documenta-Halle, documenta 14, Kassel (2017)
• No Man’s Land, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C (2016)
• 6 Künstler aus Basel, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2011)

Website

Miriam Cahn’s website can be found here.

Critical Reception

Miriam Cahn’s work has been featured in leading art magazines and platforms, including Artnet, Artforum, and Frieze.

Miriam Cahn FAQs

Ocula | 2025