Miriam Cahn is known to create works crawling on her hands and knees, sometimes naked and sometimes with her eyes closed. Performance and product bleed into one as the Swiss artist leaves her physical residue on her roughed up paper canvases.
Since the 1970's Cahn has been creating work that both incorporates and departs from feminist ideals. Evading traditional classifications of method and material, body and mind, Cahn shifts fluidly between media and styles. Some of her practices are imbued with female rituals; for example, she sometimes creates work around her menstrual cycle. Other processes involve hunching over a canvas and grinding a chunk of charcoal into dust to create abstract forms. But her physical routines seem only to summon the artwork, not dictate it.
Her enigmatic forms, innocent and raw with a hint of violence, form like ghosts emerging from her blind sketches.; the androgynous creatures become totems of beauty, violence and sexuality. Although Cahn's fingerprints and footprints peak out from her shadowy forms, their haunting affect suggests their construction involves some otherworldly secret. The combination of physicality and ghostliness mimics Cahn's recurring themes of experience and memory.
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