Encounter with Miriam Cahn

Exhibition tour

Tuesday, 4 June 2019 - 7pm
Free, until full capacity is reached. Prior registration required (complete capacity)
Place
Sabatini Building, Floor 3
Encounter language:

Spanish, with simultaneous translation into English
Visit conducted by the curators of the exhibition, Ana Ara and Fernando López

Admission:

Complete capacity

Organized by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
Miriam Cahn, schlafen, 1997. Installation, variable dimensions. Detail: oil on canvas No. 1 of 13. Gallery Meyer Riegger Karlsruhe and Gallery Jocelyn Wolff. Photo: Francois Doury © Miriam Cahn
Miriam Cahn, schlafen, 1997. Installation, variable dimensions. Detail: oil on canvas No. 1 of 13. Gallery Meyer Riegger Karlsruhe and Gallery Jocelyn Wolff. Photo: Francois Doury © Miriam Cahn

Due to circumstances beyond the organization, this visit will be conducted by the curators of the exhibition, Ana Ara and Fernando López

In conjunction with the solo exhibition Miriam Cahn. Everything Is Equally Important (running until 14 October 2019), the artist will conduct a tour around the exhibition prior to its opening in the Museo, touching on the key points in her creative process and her understanding of painting tied to the body, performance and feminism.

The artistic practice of Miriam Cahn (Basel, Switzerland, 1949) is caught between oppression and fascination. Her works contain figures that pervade the pictorial field, an empty space with scant references; eerie and hallucinatory beings with schematic and primitive traits: their bodies, often naked, sparkle, lit by fluorescent and artificial light, while their faces, with an air of vulnerability, sketch violent and unsettling gestures. The archetypes that inhabit this iconographic universe lead to an interpretation of her painting through existential themes: solitude, sexuality, violence, destruction, whilst also referring, along with her texts, to specific situations, for instance the Gulf War and the Balkan Wars, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the current refugee crisis and the #MeToo movement.

To the backdrop of her works, Cahn will talk about these connections and how to reconsider the work and the notion of painting in traditionally masculine art history and inside a present-day context with image overload.

Miriam Cahn has exhibited her work internationally in numerous solo and collective shows in different museums and art centres, for instance Kunsthalle Basel (1983), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (1984), Kunsthaus Zürich (1993), the La Caixa Foundation, Madrid (2003), la Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2004), Le Plateau, Paris (2012) and the Tinguely Museum, Basel (2017). She has also taken part in major events such as documenta 7 (1982) and documenta 14 (2017), Kassel.