Born in Basel in 1949, Miriam Cahn is widely recognised as one of the most urgent and compelling voices in contemporary international art. Spanning more than five decades, her practice—primarily painting, drawing and pastel—has maintained a rare ethical and formal consistency. The human body, violence, desire, vulnerability and war form the core of an oeuvre that rejects both the aestheticisation of suffering and any form of compromise.
Despite the growing international recognition her work has received in recent years—from the Venice Biennale to major retrospectives at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid—Italy has until now lacked a comprehensive institutional presentation of her work.
Occupying MACRO's main gallery, a space of approximately 1,400 square metres, the exhibition brings together more than one hundred works spanning the artist's entire career, from the late 1970s to the present day. Rather than following a chronological sequence, the exhibition unfolds through a series of thematic constellations that reveal the continuity of Cahn's formal and political concerns: the representation of the female body, the denunciation of wartime violence, and eroticism as an act of resistance.
Large-scale charcoal drawings from the artist's early years enter into dialogue with the intensely coloured watercolours of the 1980s and early 1990s devoted to Atombombe (Atomic Bomb)—a subject whose relevance has returned with alarming force—as well as with her more recent paintings on canvas. Together, these works testify to the enduring radicalism of a visual language whose expressive power has remained undiminished over time.
The body lies at the centre of Cahn's work—fragmented, exposed and resilient—rendered through an urgent, raw pictorial language that deliberately resists any notion of formal perfection.
A central element of the exhibition is the presentation of Cahn's room installations, a format she has developed since the 1980s and which has become one of the most distinctive aspects of her artistic practice. These are not simply groupings of works, but autonomous environments conceived as coherent units of meaning. Each installation brings together a specific body of work designed to enter into dialogue within a carefully articulated spatial configuration. For Cahn, the room installation is a way of thinking—a means of expressing spatially what a single painting cannot contain on its own.
The exhibition at MACRO features the room installations Herumliegen (2022) and Familienraum (1996–2009). Created in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Herumliegen embodies the urgency of an immediate reaction to unfolding events. Cahn neither documents nor comments on war—she responds to it, with the same immediacy that has always characterised her practice. The title, Herumliegen ("lying around" or "scattered across the ground"), evokes abandoned bodies, defenceless presences and the merciless image of mass death. As the artist has stated in relation to her work on the war in Ukraine: "The repetition of violence in wartime is not intended to shock, but to denounce."
A second narrative unfolds through Familienraum, an installation composed of twelve oil paintings and four drawings created over more than a decade, between 1996 and 2009. The installation brings together figures, characters, interiors and landscapes that function as abstract portraits of members of the artist's family or as visions of inner landscapes.
If Herumliegen is a visceral response to contemporary wars and conflicts, Familienraum turns inward—to memory, intimacy and the geography of personal experience. Here, remembering and communicating through images become the very substance of the work. Cahn's individual visual memories occupy a point of intersection between personal and collective past and present, achieving an autonomy that transcends time itself.
Presented together, the two installations map out the coordinates of a practice that refuses any separation between the public and the private sphere. War and family, massacre and intimate memory, political outcry and personal experience coexist, continually intersecting and contaminating one another.
The exhibition design has been conceived by Didier Fiúza Faustino // Bureau des Mésarchitectures. A French-Portuguese conceptual artist and architect, Fiúza Faustino explores the relationship between body and space. Situated at the intersection of art and architecture, his multidisciplinary practice ranges from installations and experimental interventions to sculptural works and the design of environments that engage the senses.
His work investigates the body in its perceptual, social and political dimensions, placing it in situations of instability and tension. Characterised by a critical approach, his projects create unprecedented experiences that challenge both the individual and the collective body.
MIRIAM CAHN (Basilea, 1949) is regarded as one of the leading figures in the international contemporary art scene. Her practice centres on the image of the body and the conditions of its visibility, poised between appearance and disappearance. Painting, drawing and photography form a visual language characterised by a spectral, ethereal quality. Shaped by the feminist theories and movements of the 1970s, Cahn has consistently explored the many facets of femininity through intimate representations of the naked body that reject socially and culturally constructed ideals of female beauty. Her work addresses themes including war, violence, power, sexuality, vulnerability and mortality, combining an uncompromising political stance with a deeply personal visual vocabulary. Over the course of her career, Cahn has presented numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Her work has been shown at documenta (1982 and 2017), the Venice Biennale (1984 and 2022), the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (1998), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2017), the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2023), and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2024), among many other international institutions.