The artistic production of Miriam Cahn (Basel, Switzerland, 1949) materialises with a strong influence from 1960s feminist and pacifist movements. For the artist, her work with drawing and painting is a bodily act with a performative quality, and since the start of her career in the 1970s the centrality of the body has been related to a growing awareness of feminism. For Cahn, art is politics and the imprint of issues related to contemporary society can be discerned in her oeuvre. Each gesture, movement and thought is “just as important” as the rest. The breadth of her work is traversed by her interest in important issues: feminist defence, war, violence, sexuality, family and death.
Moreover, the artist alludes to intersections and connections with the work Pablo Picasso produced during the Spanish Civil War. During the Yugoslav Wars, the media showed images of concentration camps, torture, and the rape of women and girls… their faces expressing the pain that made her think of the weeping women in Picasso’s work. Works that recount ethnic clashes between the peoples of the former Yugoslavia or the media’s use of contemporary armed conflicts as a spectacle.
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