MIRIAM CAHN
2011-11-21This exhibition will focus on Cahn’s painting practice spanning three decades. A beloved and historically significant voice in Switzerland, Cahn represented her home country at the 41st Venice Biennale in 1984.
In Drawing Room Confessions Issue #3, a journal published on the occasion of Cahn’s current solo exhibition with the David Roberts Art Foundation in London, Cahn describes how her investigations in film, drawing, books, and performance inevitably led to making paintings. Growing up with black and white television and experiencing art history through books with black and white plates brought Cahn to rule out color as an unnecessary complication in her early career. Color signified wealth since few could afford to print in color.
Years later, Cahn began producing paintings in color for the first time. Cahn’s psychosomatic color palette is generational, influenced by the hyperreality of color experience depicted in artificially colored films like Michelangelo Antonioni’s, Il deserto rosso (1964). The idiosyncratic quality of her paintings can be seen as an intentional confusion of perception with reality. The figure, animal, or landscape becomes reduced to a few brutal performative gestures in some paintings while areas of sensitive but deliberate rendering exist in others.
Opposite – Lächeln, 1996
Exhibition runs through to December 22nd, 2011
Elizabeth Dee Gallery
545 West 20th Street
New York
NY
10011
