Miriam Cahn

Miriam Cahn was born in 1949 in Basel, Switzerland. She trained in graphic arts at Basel's Gewerbeschule (later the Schule fur Gestaltung) from around 1968 into the mid-1970s, a vocational art and design school; no academic degree is documented in published sources, and a single gallery biography's claim that she also studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva is not corroborated elsewhere. After her studies she worked as a drawing teacher.

Cahn's early practice centered on large-scale drawings made directly on the floor, using her whole body as a drawing instrument, and she was active in the anti-nuclear and women's movements. She came to international attention through documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, where she reportedly removed her own work in protest, and consolidated her reputation the following year with Beirut-Beirut at Kunsthalle Basel, an exhibition often described as the first solo show by a woman at that institution. In 1984 she represented Switzerland at the 41st Venice Biennale. Her later practice, mainly in pastel, charcoal, and watercolor, is built around ambiguous nude and body imagery exploring violence, refuge, intimacy, and the pressures of social conformity. She lives and works today in Stampa, in the canton of Graubunden, Switzerland.

Cahn's institutional trajectory is unusually long and consistent for a market that has only recently caught up with it. She has appeared twice at documenta, in 1982 and 2017, and represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1984. A wave of major European recognition followed in 2019, when Kunstmuseum Bern's retrospective I as Human traveled to Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and continued through Ma pensee serielle at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2023, described as a major retrospective at a French institution, and Reading Dust at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 2024 and 2025. Her recognitions include the Meret Oppenheim Prize in 1997, the Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen in 2022, and the Kaiserring of the City of Goslar in 2024, alongside the Kathe Kollwitz Prize and the Basler Kunstpreis, whose exact award years are not confirmed in published sources. Critics and curators consistently describe her work as using the body, and particularly ambiguous nude and animal imagery, to confront violence, war, and the homogenizing pressures placed on women and marginalized bodies.

Cahn's auction record is Das Genaue Hinschauen (The Close Look) (2018), which sold for GBP 584,200 (about USD 703,000 including fees) at Sotheby's "The Now" evening sale in London in March 2023. Market reporting from Artnet notes that nearly all of her top ten auction prices were set in the first half of 2023, including the second-highest result, o.t. (2017), which brought roughly HK$2.29 million (about USD 291,900) at Phillips Hong Kong that October. A later resale of Im weg liegen (2013) at Sotheby's London in March 2025 brought only about USD 187,200, below its own 2023 sale price, a sign that results can vary significantly by work and moment of sale. Artprice records roughly 281 public auction appearances for the artist overall, indicating a market with real depth but one whose top tier is still thin and recently formed.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Cahn, so provenance and verification depend on her two representing galleries, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff and Meyer Riegger, together with documented exhibition and collection history. Her strongest auction results are concentrated in a short window around 2023, and a 2025 resale coming in under the 2023 result for the same work is a reminder that her secondary market is still young and can move sharply on a single sale. The countervailing strength is depth of institutional support: holdings at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Museo Reina Sofia, and the Centre Pompidou, among others, give her market a foundation that most artists with a comparably short auction history do not have.