MGKSiegen presents Miriam Cahn: MEINEJUDEN for 14th Rubens Prize

June 26–October 23, 2022

Miriam Cahn has developed a purposefully feminist and independent viewpoint since the beginning of her artistic development in the 1970s. Cahn has created a painterly oeuvre of tremendous expressive power starting with drawing and completely free of academic constraints. He also incorporates other artistic genres like literature, photography, cinematography, and sculpture. Her main areas of interest include humanity, the frailty of the human body, and how it interacts with other living things in nature, including plants, animals, and landscapes. Social political events are mixed with first-hand accounts, recollections from the family, and reflections from the present. Themes that reoccur include womanhood, gender, love, sexuality, violence, anti-Semitism, war, and flight. Cahn’s uncompromising portrayal of the unimaginable forces the audience to take a hard look and interact deeply with the myriad inconsistencies in our reality.

The MEINEJUDEN (My Jews) exhibition provides a thorough overview of Miriam Cahn’s body of work and commemorates the 14th Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen. She displays significant groups of works and installations from the last five decades in 14 rooms that the artist created specifically for the exhibition, in addition to a large number of new pieces. The exhibition includes early sketchbooks, texts, sculptures, performance movies, floor-to-ceiling chalk drawings, pastel and watercolour works on paper, and extremely colorful paintings. The Rubens Prize winner revisits the subject of being Jewish in her new pieces, picking up the title of the exhibition she chose.

Miriam Cahn (born in Basel in 1949) represents one of the most highly regarded artistic positions in Switzerland; today, she is also considered one of the world’s most important artists. She was invited to documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982 and represented at the Venice Biennale in 1984. Since then, her work has been shown in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, including Kunsthalle Basel (1983), Museum of Modern Art, New York (1984), Kunstmuseum Bonn (1985), Kunsthaus Zurich (1993), Fundación La Caixa, Madrid (2003), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2004), Badischer Kunstverein (2014) and Kunsthalle Kiel (2016). Miriam Cahn was represented at documenta 14, Kassel (2017), and the 21st Sydney Biennale (2018). In 2019 alone, Cahn had major exhibitions across Europe, including the Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Reina Sofía Madrid, Haus der Kunst Munich, and the National Gallery of Modern Art Warsaw. Last year, The Power Plant, Toronto is showing an extensive solo presentation of the artist’s work. She herself realised “FREMD das fremde” – a site-specific exhibition in Palazzo Castelmur (Canton Graubünden/Switzerland). Her work is 2022 being presented at the Fondazione ICA Milano, Milan, and in the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale. In 2023, a large solo exhibition by Miriam Cahn will open at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Miriam Cahn lives and works in Stampa, Graubünden, Switzerland.

The exhibition and the 14th Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen will be commemorated by a thorough monograph and an accompanying brochure, both of which will be released by DISTANZ Verlag in September 2022.

Curator: Thomas Thiel