Miriam Cahn

Miriam Cahn was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1949, and trained in graphic arts at the Schule für Gestaltung Basel. Her practice has expanded across drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, performance, film, and writing, yet drawing has remained the animating core of her work since its earliest phase. In the 1970s and into the 1980s, she developed large-scale charcoal works applied directly to floors and walls — a physically demanding, site-specific approach that challenged conventional gallery presentation and established drawing as a bodily, performative, and politically engaged act. From that foundation she extended her visual vocabulary toward imagery of warships, fighter aircraft, television screens, and other militarized subjects, bringing questions of power, technology, and gendered politics into direct confrontation with the intimacy of the drawn mark.

Cahn's institutional presence has been sustained and international. She represented Switzerland at the 41st Venice Biennale in 1984, and her work appeared at Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982 and again at Documenta 14. Solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1983, the Städtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in 1985, and the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1993 traced her growing recognition across the German-speaking world. Later institutional presentations extended that reach significantly: everything is equally important at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, MIRIAM CAHN: I AS HUMAN at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw — all in 2019 — demonstrated the breadth of her international standing. ME AS HAPPENING, presented at The Power Plant, marked her first major solo exhibition in North America. More recently, READING DUST at the Stedelijk Museum represented a major late-career institutional statement, and MEINEJUDEN was presented in connection with the Rubenspreis in Siegen in 2022.

Cahn's work is held in the collections of MoMA in New York, Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Pinault Collection, and the Rubell Collection, among others. She has received the Basler Kunstpreis, the Prix Meret Oppenheim — Switzerland's foremost federal distinction in the arts — and the Rubenspreis der Stadt Siegen, awarded in 2022 by the city of Siegen and presented through the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen. She held a residency at the Landis & Gyr Stiftung in 1996 and is currently represented by Galerie Jocelyn Wolff in Romainville.