NYAB Event - Miriam Cahn Exhibition

Miriam Cahn Exhibition

Elizabeth Dee

This event has ended.

Elizabeth Dee presents Miriam Cahn's second solo exhibition at the gallery. After Cahn's long awaited re-introduction to New York last season, this exhibition will focus on Cahn's painting practice spanning three decades. A beloved and historically important voice in Switzerland, who represented her home country at the 1984 Venice Biennale, this exhibition will highlight one of Cahn's most acclaimed disciplines.

In Drawing Room Confessions Issue #3, edited by Vincent Honoré and Manuela Ribadeneira, Cahn describes how her investigations in film, drawing, books, and performance led to making paintings.1 Growing up with black and white television and experiencing art history through books with black and white plates affected Cahn's decision to rule out color as unnecessary in her early career.

In 1994, Cahn began painting in color for the first time. Her psychosomatic palette developed in relation to the advent of color in film and mass media. Cahn speaks about the hyperreality of color depicted in films like Michelangelo Antonioni's, Il deserto rosso (1964) effectively bringing about a turning point in her practice. Painting also acts as a viable medium to retain the corporeality and speed of her earlier large-scale drawings and performances. Figures, animals, or landscapes become few brutal performative gestures in some paintings, while areas of sensitive and deliberate rendering exist in others.

Cahn's intuitive decisions result in psychologically complex and historically ambiguous works. She might decide upon a predetermined amount of time - a matter of hours, a night, a week - to feverishly complete a body of work from scratch. When she returns to the pieces, she never makes adjustments, rather, she edits; Cahn wholly approves or rejects her works destroying what is not essential. While retaining the spontaneity and power of her drawings, films, and performances, Cahn's paintings speak to the development of color images in television, film, and print-production from her mid-century childhood to today.

Miriam Cahn has exhibited widely over the last thirty years. Select exhibitions include David Roberts Art Foundation (2011, solo); Galerie Meyer Riegger, Berlin/Karlsruhe (2009, solo); Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris (2009, solo); David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2009); Kirchner Museum, Davos, Switzerland (2006, catalog); MGK Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2006); Fundación La Caixa, Madrid, Spain (2003, solo, catalog); Castello di Rivara, Centro d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivara, Italy (1999, solo); ICA London (1997); Kunsthaus Zürich (1993, solo, catalog); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (1992); 5th Sydney Biennial (1986); 41st Venice Biennale (1984); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1984); Kunsthalle Basel (1983, solo); Documenta 7, Kassel (1982), STAMPA, Basel (1981, 1979, 1977, solos)

[Image: Miriam Cahn "Lächeln" (1996) Oil on canvas, 27.56 x 15.75 in.]