Palais de Tokyo

Miriam Cahn imagines new material incarnations of that which disturbs us, confronting us with that which we would prefer to ignore: here it looks us straight in the eye, in a bodily confrontation from which we cannot escape.

Day after day, through an intense pictorial oeuvre which encompasses drawing, photography, films, and writing, Miriam Cahn suspends the flux of volatile images of contemporary geopolitics and takes them up to witness, to resist and to embody them. Today she is recognized as one of the world’s most important contemporary artists.

The exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo is the first major retrospective devoted to Miriam Cahn’s work in a French institution, bringing together more than two hundred of her works from 1980 through to the present day. In place of the unique artwork, she channels a quasi-organic flow of images, sometimes organized like a narrative, her style refusing linearity in favour of explosive clusters and flights that allow for a rereading of the categories of art history. Portraits, landscape, and history painting, as well as the private and the collective all blend together to form an organic whole. New chromatic and spatial dissonances and concordances appear, underlining the fact that the challenge of the work lies not in some quest for balance but rather in finding plastic and spatial incarnations of the world’s intensity and chaos. The stakes of Miriam Cahn’s oeuvre lie not in some quest for balance but rather in finding plastic and spatial incarnations of the world’s intensity and chaos. Images combine with words in a cyclical and infinite narrative that plays out constantly across the pages of notebooks, on the surface of the canvases, and in the digital variations that proliferate through scrolling projections. As Miriam Cahn herself reminds us, “an exhibition is a work in itself and I see it as a performance.”

Curators: Emma Lavigne and Marta Dziewańska