A compelling tour of the 2011 painting exhibition by beloved Swiss artist Miriam Cahn capturing extraordinary detail and the experience of seeing the work in the gallery first hand.
Miriam Cahn is a beloved and historically important voice in Switzerland, who represented her home country at the 1984 Venice Biennale. In 2011, Elizabeth Dee proudly presented two solo-exhibitions at the gallery including her first solo-exhibition in New York since her drawings were shown at the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art in 1984.
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)
Please visit our Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/channels/elizabethdee) and YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/ElizabethDeeChannel) channels for a complete selection of new media productions by Elizabeth Dee Gallery in collaboration with Tom Powel Imaging.