Miriam Cahn. Luis Grañena
Miriam Cahn (Basel, Switzerland, 1949) has been used to fights and controversy since her beginnings as an artist.
The eldest daughter of a cultured German Jewish family who in 1933 had to take refuge in Switzerland fleeing Nazi terror, she grew up fueled by the need to rebel.
The last ideological scandal of hers has starred in Paris, in the Palais de Tokyo.
In February, she opened a broad retrospective with content in line with the exhibition she held in 2019 at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, but with an extra series dedicated to the war in Ukraine.
One of her paintings is titled
Fuck Abstraction
.
It depicts a man forcing a handcuffed victim to give him fellatio, together with another kneeling figure he holds by the head.
Marine Le Pen's party, National Rally, and six associations against child violence brought the Swiss painter before the Administrative Court of Paris.
They demanded to censor that work and prohibit the exhibition to those under 18 years of age.
The French justice ruled last week in favor of the artist and considered the complaint unfounded.
Cahn has preferred not to make statements, although through the museum he has expressed his agreement to include an explanation next to the work in question: "It is the war in Ukraine and it is the Bucha massacre."
The exhibition remains open until May 14.
Her father, a prosperous antique dealer, helped her develop her artistic interests by paying for her studies in graphic arts.
She is an active participant in the feminist and anti-nuclear movements, her first works were large charcoal drawings on the walls and train tracks.
Her traces accompanied by her proclamations were executed at night, on the run.
In 1979 she was arrested for some murals with which she protested against the construction of a bridge in Basel.
Tall, robust and very short on words, her gaze is so distrustful that it seems to warn that she does not trust anyone.
A slight limp recalls the accident suffered when she was driving by car towards her refuge in Bergell, an idyllic alpine valley that connects the canton of Grisons with Italy.
In this unique bunker-shaped building, built by Armando Ruinelli, the artist lives and works, aware that she is a privileged person who cannot ignore any drama.
What Cahn paints, draws or films is not touched or manipulated.
Her themes have to do with contemporary tragedies and conflicts, too sensitive a material for her to allow interventions however small.
They are also issues that are present in her biography: the Holocaust, flight, terror, discrimination for being a foreigner,
the suicide of her little sister, the abuse for being a woman and the wars.
Always the wars.
His work is not easy to contemplate.
At first glance, his compositions stand out for their surprising mix of colors and faces with empty eye sockets.
But those eye-catching mauves, pinks, greens or oranges loaded with glitter portray situations that freeze the heart.
It is what she has been looking for for five decades: to describe horror without palliatives.
The hardness of his narration has not prevented the recognition of his work from growing day by day.
He represented Switzerland at the last Venice Biennale, participated in Documenta in 1982 (he withdrew his work due to a disagreement with the director, Rudi Fuchs) and is in the permanent collections of museums such as the Tate Modern in London, the Reina Sofía and the Pinault Collection in Paris, among others.
Its price has been increasing over time.
Its German gallery owners speak of between 50,000 and 105,000 euros for large-format oil paintings and even a million for large installations.
Manuel Borja-Villel says that the idea of dedicating an exhibition to the artist at the Reina Sofía, the most important that Cahn had had until then, occurred to him after seeing his work at Documenta in Kassel and at the stand of his gallery owner. Jocelyn Wolff in Arc.
The former director of the Reina says that he found her both disturbing and interesting, something very unusual.
She already knew her peculiar way of creating: lying on the floor, with her eyes closed, drawing with her whole body and following the dictates of biological rhythms such as menstruation.
“As soon as we proposed it to her, she delightedly accepted to travel to Madrid.
We exhibited 200 works and she decided how and what she wanted to show”.
About 10 days before the inauguration, he arrived in Madrid without demands, on his own.
She was delighted with the building.
The fact that, being the Hospital de San Carlos, it had housed so much suffering, seemed appropriate to his exhibition.
She entered the museum and began to direct the assembly with the material that had already arrived and a gift: three drawings tribute to the woman who cries in Guernica
,
by Picasso.
Her works had been chosen between her and her curators.
"She asked us," recall Ana Ara and Fernando López, "that we choose without mental elaborations, but based on whether we liked the work or not."
Generous but bossy, she decided the itineraries, marked the height of the works (none above her eyes) and placed the showcases in the elevator area, out of the way.
Despite the harshness of the content, the exhibition did not record any incidents and no one felt offended.
Nothing to do with what happened in Paris.
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