What Looks at Us

By Elga Wimmer

Swiss born artist Miriam Cahn’s path to international recognition has been long and tenacious. Although active in feminist art movements in the 1970s and 1980s, and having represented Switzerland at the 41st Venice Biennial in 1984, she got her big break decades later in her career, when she participated in Documenta 14, 2017.

This high profile exposure was soon followed by shows at the prestigious Haus der Kunst, Munich; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others. Her paintings, sculptures, drawings and installation pieces attracted attention for their uncomfortable subject matter, often dealing with psychological issues, violence, war, and examining gender roles.

Fast-forward to 2025, and we see Cahn remains true to form, pressing on with much the same themes that have informed her life’s work to date. In her current show What looks at us at Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), which runs through October 27, 2025, a horizontal wall announces the exhibition with several self-portraits by the artist, life-size, nude, unapologetic. Curated by João Pinharanda and Sérgio Mah, the show gets under your skin, makes one slightly uncomfortable, though not in a shocking way.

Wooden sculptures in various shapes and sizes cover the entire floor of the first gallery space, like bodies, mended with clips and bolts, as if soldiers wounded returning from war. The wood takes on a noble aspect, with its smooth, almost skin-like surface. On the walls surrounding these sculptures a digital slide show depicts body parts and heads in plaster, figures appearing in many of Cahn’s drawings and paintings such as a hand stretched out or touching another hand or body part, heads frozen in a smile or a scream. The video installation accentuates the human likeness of the wooden sculptures, as the title reveals, Schlachtfeld (Battlefield).

Cahn often plays with words, combining German words into a single title, as in Weinenmuessen (Need to Cry or Forced to Cry). In this installation, several paintings and drawings form one body of work. Weinender Soldat (Crying Soldier) goes against the German expression “A Soldier doesn’t Cry.” Cahn humanizes the soldier. There is the anguished look, the hollow eyes, and a red mouth that resembles a wound. Another work shows a head covered in blue-green hair,  the same color in the skin on part of the face, giving a ghostly appearance, purple colored tears streaming from dark eye openings, grey teeth shown through a wide open mouth. The figure is universal, neither woman nor man, expressing the horrors of war, while yet, as in Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, both attractive and repulsive.  

The exhibition is arranged to devote entire rooms to specific works of art, as with Undarstellbar (Unfathomable), and Unser Fruehling (Our Spring). In the latter work, two dark figures, a tall one dragging a smaller one, suggests an abduction, or a rescue, in front of an open field of green/ yellow/ brown, under a blue grey sky. The juxtaposition of an idyllic landscape, bears witness to tragedy.

In a larger painting, Unser Meeresboden (Our Seabed), bodies of adults and children are depicted lying peacefully at the bottom of a cobalt blue ocean, as if in a deep sleep, no signs of violence or aggression, but arraigned as if mummified for eternity. In Nichts (nothing), a large figure bent over, with hands tied behind the back, is shown in front of a blueish grey background, his arm with a clenched fist hitting another figure in the groin. The besieged appears faceless. His apparent attacker only shows his fist. Is this a reference to the battle of Goliath and David, albeit roles reversed? It is typically an open question in the paintings of Miriam Cahn. Her brushstrokes imbue great vigor to the human figures in her work, even in distress or death.

Cahn dares to explore taboo subject matter in art: Pregnant women, women giving birth, men and women violated, physical and emotional. Swiss writer Hans Joerg Schneider, who met and befriended Cahn in the 1970s, describes her early drawings of pregnant women, and the piercing eyes of her protagonists as unapologetic and untamable. Cahn has persevered, etching out her own path as an artist for over fifty years, and shows no sign of slowing down.