Miriam Cahn: Dream Command

Born in Basel in 1949, Cahn is one of the most prominent and daring artists on the international art scene and in contemporary European painting. Over more than four decades, she has developed a singular and uncompromising artistic language centered on the human body – exposed and vulnerable, yet deeply powerful. Through this language, she explores complex and often volatile themes of identity and gender, violence and war, displacement and migration. Her colorful paintings, which are populated by raw, schematic and primal figures, shift constantly between the personal and the political, and between the intimate and the historical.

Cahn’s art does not offer an escape from reality, rather it insists on looking at it head-on, even at its most unbearable. Her gaze turns repeatedly toward sites of violence, war, and destruction – from Sarajevo and Ukraine to the current war in Israel and Gaza. This is not a passing fascination with a “hot button” issue, but a consistent ethical and artistic stance: to look at injustice wherever it exists, to acknowledge human vulnerability wherever it is exposed, and to give it form and color. In Cahn’s work, the world’s injustices converge with beauty and with the vulnerability of the body and nature – without shying away from what is repressed, silenced, or threatening.