Miriam Cahn is a Large Swiss art . Grew up in the family of a classical archaeologist and antique dealer in Basel, she works now in the Val bregaglia. The 70-to pick Year for us at the bus station in Stampa. It is midday, Sunny and cold, the road is cleared. Everywhere else the snow.

The Studio building is to the street windowless concrete cube with 20 times 30 meters. After all, on the back there is window. The building consists of three rooms. The largest square is almost. On its walls are hundreds of pictures. You to turn the visitors back. Of the two smaller rooms, one used as a warehouse for paper, the other as a living room. Spartan. Kitchen, bed, toilet, shower and a wall of books.

she is in demand worldwide

The exhibition will go on tour: On the Berner Premiere, the house of art in Munich, then the Krischanitz-art gallery in Warsaw in the summer. Cahn’s art is in demand worldwide. At any place other spatial relationships will prevail, otherwise hanged. “It is the same work in a different context,” says Cahn. “How the Interpretation of a classical piece of music, different each Time, but yet somehow the same.”

Then she surprised me with a brusque remark: “Once a work is sold, it is dead to me.” How the? “I can’t use it then. With the images that are here in the Studio or in my gallery, where you are just in Commission, I live. On these pictures I can still have access.”

she speaks of her admiration for Picasso. Once Picasso had exhibited his pictures in a Church. Very quickly it went. “Today, you would say, performative. Many of the pictures had no frames. The hanging was irregular. He has made something of their Own. That is the point. Today, however, we see in the museums around the loan. What is also absurd is, today, where all of the trips. Often the hanging is sterile. Large distances between the images desired by the insurance companies. Picasso would laugh a fraction.”

you said that the issue of sexual Assault in our society is not yet done.

In her Studio, the images show your brown back. They stand one behind the other stacked. On the left wall pictures for Madrid, on the right to Bregenz. Everything is prepared for the two exhibitions, which are independent of Berne, Munich and Warsaw planned to Look. “It is good that my pictures are there,” says Miriam Cahn, “but you don’t look at me every day.”

Miriam Cahn is painting since her youth. “For me, art is created in the Moment in which I sit down or hinstehe and do what I need to do.” Pictures of a kind of Performance, is paint for you she always says. She works usually between 12 and 15 o’clock. Of course, the discipline needs. “In my case, the seclusion is important, the Emeriten. I can only do alone, and with the highest concentration of an image. But, why is it always all want to know how a picture like that?”

Now we are at #MeToo. She says the issue of sexual Assault on women was not done in our society at all. But #MeToo is just a trigger for your images. Because there are several topics, which would lead to a particular work. Sarajevo, Abu Ghraib, 9/11: the world-historical cuts of the last few decades that have upset you.

politicization

“As an artist, I comment on the need for these events. You are a incision in our complacency,” says Cahn. “That I react so has to do with the 60s and 70s. As a how to make Andy Warhol art, and at the same time women such as Ulrike Rosenbach, Valie Export, and Friederike Petzold on the Plan, which was something entirely New occurred. A loner such as Meret Oppenheim was never a role model.”

For Cahn was in 1975, the occupation of Kaiseraugst, where you had a nuclear power plant want to build, the actual trigger of your political thought. Already in her Childhood, the atomic bomb was an issue, your parents have demonstrated against the atomic armament of the Swiss army. Then she saw Alain Resnais’ Film “Hiroshima mon amour” (1959). “I still think the atom bomb is beautiful and at the same time, absolutely terrible.”

time and again the boxer’s hand get slammed in a face

In contrast to the atom bombs Cahn has painted never pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. She has written a Text that is printed in the exhibition book. In the beginning, you get a reminder of the artist Valie Export, who had led, in 1968, the art historian Peter Weibel as a dog on a leash in and around Vienna. “On the photos where the soldier than Lynndie England in Abu Ghraib a prisoner on a leash, we have the same gesture. It is the reversal of a power-situation, which usually, pry the man at the controls. If it is played, you can do that. If it is torture, then that is not. It is the ambivalence of a gesture, which is of interest to me.”

In your newer pictures, Miriam Cahn signed often a boxer’s hand that POPs on a face. For you, this is a Gesture, when you don’t know exactly what you mean. Sometimes a woman, sometimes a man, have a erigiertes link to box. Maybe he Masturbates in front of her? “There are tons of great marriages in our society,” she says. “The picture shows what is shown. But behind the stories are, therefore, also, that the text book is to me this exhibition is so important.”

Two hours per image

Earlier, Miriam Cahn signed their pictures on the ground, and chalk images in black and white, created with the full use of the body. Then she got back pain. So she began to paint with Oil. “As soon as you have something on the wall, is quite something else,” she says. Thus, in the oil Paintings of the same energy as in your chalk work, she paints in her Studio, the very large images in an almost eerie pace. One to two hours per image. In Bern, the largest image that you ever did see, 5 times 2.5 meters.

Then we talk about eternity in the art. Miriam Cahn is contrary to the theme. “After my death, the things are sold, if I’m lucky. If not, I have had bad. I don’t work at least not for eternity. I’m also not a big, heroic men artists. When painters such as Baselitz or Lüpertz lost and say they worked for eternity, then I say: it’s chicken feed.”

Miriam Cahn: “I as a human being”, Kunstmuseum, Bern, to 16. June.

(editing Tamedia)

Created: 21.02.2019, 18:33 PM