Miriam Cahn
Born: Basel, Switzerland 1949.
After training in Basel and Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, Miriam Cahn moved to West Berlin. It was there that she produced her best-known work in the 1980s. Primarily working on paper, using black chalk, chalk relied on her physicality and intuition to create her drawings from the chalk dust. In describing the process that produced her work, Cahn referred to putting herself "as a whole person, as a whole woman, into certain moods," before settling down to work on the floor. The scraping of the chalk dust from a larger block was part of the ritualistic preparation, the results of which relied on the artists pushing her body into the piece. Cahn described her creation process as similar to reading leaves initially her works LIS, which stands for Lesen in Staub (reading in the dust). Panoramic landscape such as City, blurry female figures, children, animals and mask-like faces are common threads in her drawings. Cahn works in a series, no individual picture taking precedence - the direct emotional strength of her work is most evident when the work is viewed as a whole. She has also produced large watercolours referring to nuclear explosions. Most of her later works have been richly coloured paintings.
Masterpieces:
Wolken series.
Atom bomb series.
City.
text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.
Images: google images.