Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, when I tell you about the art of Miriam Cahn (born in 1949), this Swiss artist who dynamites our certainties with the force of an atomic bomb. In her bunker-studio in Grisons, far from the superficial social scene of contemporary art, she creates every day for exactly three hours, like a Zen monk who has traded his saffron robe for paint-stained work clothes. Not a minute more, not a second less. An immutable ritual that gives birth to works as striking as a Mike Tyson uppercut in his prime.
Let me first tell you about her technique, as brutal as it is effective, which redefines the boundaries of contemporary art. Cahn paints as she breathes, with urgency and absolute necessity, with an intensity that makes the walls of her Alpine studio tremble. Her canvases are born from hand-to-hand combat with matter, without preliminary sketches, without possible repentance, in a fierce battle against time and conventions. An approach reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of the present moment, this concept of “Dasein” where being reveals itself in pure action, stripped of the trappings of reflection. But be careful, make no mistake: behind this apparent spontaneity lies an absolute mastery of the medium, like a judoka who has spent years perfecting a single move to make it lethal.
Her human figures, these fluorescent ghosts that stare at us with eyes as empty as bottomless wells, emerge from the canvas like radioactive specters, bathed in colors so intense they seem to pulse with their own life. These bodies, often naked, sometimes fragmented like explosion victims, tell of the world’s violence with a force that even Francis Bacon, though a master of the subject, might have envied. Each brushstroke is as precise as a scalpel, each line as sharp as a razor blade. These figures are not mere representations, but presences that inhabit space with the authority of ancient sculptures, while bearing the stigmata of our brutal modernity.
Cahn’s technique is unique in that it combines an almost violent speed of execution with surgical precision in the choice of colors and forms. She works with urgency, certainly, but each gesture is as calculated as a chess game where every move can be fatal. Her large formats, often created on the floor like Pollock’s action paintings, are not the fruit of chance but the result of a meticulously orchestrated choreography where the entire body participates in the creative act.
Violence, the central theme of her work, is never gratuitous or spectacular. It is the mirror of our time, the cruel reflection of our daily barbarities, from the wars that tear the world apart to the more intimate violence that plays out in domestic spaces. From the conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia to the Ukrainian tragedy, Cahn captures the very essence of horror with an economy of means that commands respect. A simple charcoal line can suggest a tank, a splash of color can bring forth a tortured body. This approach brings us back to Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the mechanical reproduction of art in the modern era, where the image of war becomes so banal that it loses its power to provoke indignation. Cahn forces us to look, to not turn away from this spectacle of destruction.
In her series dedicated to contemporary conflicts, she develops a visual language that transcends simple reportage to reach a universal dimension. Her refugee figures, for example, are not mere illustrations of current events but archetypes that speak to us of exile, fear, and survival. The bodies she paints carry within them the entire history of human suffering, from the forced migrations of antiquity to the contemporary dramas of the Mediterranean.
The feminist dimension of her work is particularly interesting, as it transcends simple militancy to reach a deeper truth about the human condition. Her female bodies are not passive victims but telluric forces, modern amazons who claim their sexuality with a frankness that may shock sensitive souls. The genitals, represented without artifice or modesty, become symbols of resistance, weapons of combat in a never-ending war of the sexes. This radical approach to the representation of the female body follows in a tradition from Louise Bourgeois to Marlene Dumas, while creating its own visual vocabulary.
This assumed crudeness brings us back to Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking about the female body as a battlefield. But where Beauvoir theorized, Cahn embodies. Her women are not philosophical concepts but carnal presences that explode the conventions of representation. They urinate, bleed, give birth, fuck with a freedom that shatters centuries of artistic prudishness. Each canvas is a manifesto, a declaration of war against the established norms of female representation in art.
The very format of her works participates in this strategy of confrontation. By systematically hanging them at eye level, Cahn forces the viewer into an inescapable face-to-face encounter. It becomes impossible to maintain the comfortable distance of traditional aesthetic contemplation. We are seized, drawn into these gazes that fix us like so many disturbing mirrors of our own humanity. This staging recalls Jacques Lacan’s theories about the mirror stage, where self-recognition necessarily passes through confrontation with the other.
Her chromatic palette, with an audacity that sometimes borders on the unbearable, plays with violent contrasts that evoke Vassily Kandinsky’s experiments on spirituality in art. But where Kandinsky sought cosmic harmony, Cahn cultivates dissonance. Her electric blues neighbor flesh pinks in compositions that seem to defy any conventional chromatic logic. Acid yellows dialogue with deep blacks in a macabre dance that speaks to us of life and death, creation and destruction. It is precisely in this tension that the strength of her work resides.
The landscapes, when they appear in her work, are never mere backdrops but full-fledged actors in the drama playing out on the canvas. Whether they are her views of the Swiss Alps or her imaginary territories, they carry within them the memory of human tragedies. A solitary tree becomes a silent witness, a mountain transforms into a funerary monument. Nature, in Cahn’s work, offers no bucolic refuge. It is both accomplice and victim of our follies, as Friedrich Nietzsche so well understood in his conception of the terrible sublime. These landscapes remind us that human violence is not limited to interpersonal relations but extends to our relationship with the environment.
This tragic dimension is coupled with a deep reflection on memory and history. Born into a Jewish family that fled Nazi persecution, Cahn carries within her the weight of a collective history that irrigates each of her works. But she does not content herself with bearing witness. She transforms this burden into a creative force that transcends the simple duty of memory to reach a universal dimension. Each canvas thus becomes a lieu de mémoire, in Pierre Nora’s sense, a space where personal and collective history crystallizes and transforms.
Her work on contemporary migrants perfectly illustrates this capacity to transform historical experience into artistic vision. Her fleeing figures, reduced to ghostly silhouettes, carry within them all the world’s distress without ever falling into miserabilism. They remind us of Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the stateless person as an emblematic figure of our modernity. These works are not simple illustrations of current events but deep meditations on the human condition in the era of mass population displacement.
Performance, a major aspect of her practice, manifests not only in the act of creation but also in the spatial arrangement of her exhibitions. Each hanging becomes a unique event, a meticulously orchestrated choreography where each work dialogues with the others in a visual score of rare intensity. This is where Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thinking on the phenomenology of perception takes on its full meaning: space is no longer a simple container but becomes an integral part of the work. The viewer is invited to actively participate in this experience, their body becoming an element of the global composition.
In her charcoal drawings, created directly on the floor in a kind of creative trance, we find this same physical urgency. The entire body participates in the act of creation, transforming the paper’s surface into a battlefield where something greater than art is at stake. These works remind us of Antonin Artaud’s experiments with the theater of cruelty, where the body becomes the vehicle for a truth that transcends language. The trace of the gesture, the imprint of the artist’s body remain visible like scars from a battle against matter itself.
The texts that often accompany her works are not simple commentaries but integral parts of her artistic approach. Written in language as direct as her painting, they testify to a thought that refuses compromise and facility. Each word is weighed, each phrase is a blow struck against traditional artistic propriety. These texts function like scores that guide our reading of the works while preserving their fundamental mystery.
Each of Miriam Cahn’s work sessions is a new battle, a new challenge to artistic conventions. This regularity in intensity, this discipline in revolt, makes her work a unique testimony to our time. Miriam Cahn’s art is a salutary slap in the too-smooth face of contemporary art. In a world where aesthetics is too often reduced to “Instagrammable” merchandise, she reminds us that art can still be dangerous, that it can still hurt us, make us think, make us grow. She is living proof that painting, this supposedly moribund art, can still roar with the force of a wounded lion. Her work will remain as an essential testimony of our time, a cry of rage and hope in the night of our era.
