The oeuvre of Miriam Cahn (Swiss, born in 1949) spans more than 50 years. The artistic mediums she has used – large black chalk drawings, performance, and installations for the first 30 years, followed by a switch to painting – all center on the theme of the human condition as experienced through the body, especially the female body. Influenced by feminism, Cahn has dealt with the dark side of the human existence: addressing topics such as violence and lust, cruelty and fragility, and even the taboo of the family as not necessarily a safe place, and motherhood as not necessarily the ultimate happiness for a woman.

Cahn’s extraordinary painting skills help mediate between the audience and the uneasy, often cruel representations of her subjects. The colors and the paint application that she started to use only in 1994 now play the central role in creating an image: the paint is applied in thin layers, placed on top of each other, which gives the figures a translucent appearance, and distracts from the straightforward treatment of her subjects. In O.T., meaning Untitled, in German, the cropped female body faces the viewer, seeking eye contact through eyes that are actually black holes. Cahn’s female figures are naked, have no hair, and their mouths are present. The artwork Pornografie (Pornography, 2022, see p. 33) depicts an uneasy act of sheer violence that, for some, is connected with lust, in which the female body is reduced to an object on which brutality can be celebrated; Cahn doesn’t even bother to paint the women’s face that could signify a trace of individuality. The brilliant combination of strong red and its subtle shades, the painted framing of the tableau, and the reference to the famous 19th-century painting L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) by Gustave Courbet, made this work a captivating conversation piece, despite the fact that the violence feels real.