Intimate and haunting, Das Genaue Hinschauen is an outstanding example of Miriam Cahn’s singular oeuvre. Executed in 2018, the title of the present work translates from German to “the close look.” Imbued with quiet emotion, Cahn’s diaphanous and ambiguous figures appear simultaneously foreign and familiar. With nuanced sensitivity, Cahn has transformed sensuous colour into figurative form, highlighting genitalia, breasts, lips or eyes and suggesting fragility and fecundity. At once alluring and disquieting, Cahn’s figures have no edges. They are boundless. Mediating between motif, figure and nonfigurative space, Cahn’s soft edged subjects are determined only by the diffusive auras. Visually akin to the Determined only by the diffusive auras which surround them, mediating between motif, figure and nonfigurative space, Cahn’s soft-edged figures remembers aura outlines from works such as Wassily Kandinsky’s Dame in Moscow (1912) and Mel Ramos’s Nudes (since the 1960s). As Kandinsky’s outlines compositionally symbolized the astral body of theosophy, “Cahn, by contrast, creates transitions rather than borders; diffusion rather than difference” (Jorg Schiller, “Miriam, Cahn’s Fragmented Bodies,” Frieze, 9 November 2012, online).

In the 1990s, Cahn began working in oil paint, which she had previously avoided as she considered it a quintessentially masculine medium. However, with the introduction of oil paint came more vibrant colours. Primarily focusing on nude individuals or groups of people in empty, abstract space, Cahn’s painterly style seems to derive from children’s drawings, outsider art and cartoons, often leading characters into atmospheres suggestive of discomfort. Since the 1970s, Cahn’s paintings push for the abolishment of social norms, and seek to counter traditional representations of female and gender-specific roles. Her work is held in esteemed public collects ions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofia, Madrid; and Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw where in 2019 she was the subject of a major retrospective which also travelled to the Haus der Kunst, Munich. Most recently, in 2022, her work was prominently featured in the Venice Biennale exhibition The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani. Vivacious and daunting, Das Genaue Hinschauen is a masterful example of Cahn’s pioneering enquiry into the progressive potential of painting.