Ella Slater on What looks at us, Miriam Cahn’s latest exploration of sex, war and death, in all of their uncompromising horror.
The second Google result for the Swiss painter Miriam Cahn directs me to a Reddit forum, which seems somewhat appropriate for an artist who is no stranger to controversy. In 2023, French far-right efforts to censor a painting of hers depicting Russian war crimes in Bacha, Ukraine, were shut down after an online petition and subsequent legal battle. Cahn’s work is often described in terms of its political provocation and explicit naturel “I don’t get it,” the Reddit user ToughDentist7786 writes. “I recently saw her work in a museum in Amsterdam… and I had a visceral reaction. It’s truly horrid.”
It’s true: Cahn’s work is horrid, despite her bright colours and cartoonishly rendered figures ostensibly pointing to something more pleasant. atombombe (1987), for example, depicts atomic bombs as pulsating, psychedelic mushroom forms. In reality, the artist’s practice is preoccupied with war crimes and sexual violence, often centring conflict’s bodily consequences. What ToughDentist7786 is missing is that this predicament is Cahn’s aesthetic moment. The uncanny discomfort provoked by the disparity between material and subject is precisely where her work operates best.
At Lisbon’s MAAT, the artist presents a comprehensive selection of works from across her career, which emerged in the wake of the feminist performance art of the sixties and seventies and its concurrent social movements. Titled What looks at us, the exhibition opens with a series of large, vertical canvases holding female figures (Älterich, 2024), whose installation instructions direct that they should be hung at eye level with a viewer 1.8 metres tall – which makes them, to me, slightly taller and therefore rather intimidating. In murky greys suggestive of corpses and garish greens of nursery-rhyme vitality, the fists of these women are varyingly clenched and opened; they exist in a space between defiance and vulnerability.
The heart of the show is a large space curated by Cahn herself. The artist often hangs her own exhibitions and, as a result, rooms take on more of an installation format than a series of individual pictures. In one section, an colossal charcoal drawing of a missile silo (silo, 1982) hangs ominously above smaller drawings: a tangerine-hued tank and sheet of tissue paper on which an abstracted fleet of planes are captured mid-flight. There is something deeply unsettling about Cahn’s depictions of weaponry, machinery and architectural frameworks of power – the starkness of their forms contrasts markedly with the manic expressivity with which she renders them.
The figurative work for which Cahn is best known is invariably less subtle than her mechanic depictions. It is often only a luminescent vagina or an erect penis which differentiates Cahn’s figures; she frequently refuses specificity in a way which clashes with contemporary identity politics, situating her amidst the second-wave feminist movement in which her practice developed. The exhibition’s final room is dedicated to these bodies. I am particularly struck by an image of a woman giving birth (fuck abstraction, 2023). Alone on a swampy horizon, a beam of scarlet and small head emerges from between her legs. Cahn has often spoken of her liberty to paint scenes which she has not experienced herself as an act of empathy. In her book WRITING IN RAGE (2020), she states: “it is as if i would really have to hack off peoples limbs in order to be able to paint them like that… it is the complete rejection of any form of imagination”.
It is rage which forms the crux of Cahn’s practice, and that of What looks at us: her colourful, repetitive images disrupt the cool calm of the white cube gallery with a frenzied urgency. Her writing practice is similarly – if not even more – outspoken. The most recent works on display in the show stand out from their corporeal counterparts– they are formed of a series of typographic studies on smaller canvases. When Cahn writes to me after my visit to the show, she says that this sudden shift in subject matter derives from the importance she places on the written word, and the immediacy of its visual design. I wonder if this signals a desire to move away from images of violence, which proliferate our consciousness so much these days. Words, like art, hold the potential for change. Here I return to WRITING IN RAGE, and to a text written in 1994 to accompany a performance titled Picasso. “Anger,” Cahn writes, “became my driving force my machine a new world opened up.”
Words by Ella Slater
