Miriam Cahn — Ma pensée sérielle

Exhibition

Painting

Miriam Cahn
Ma pensée sérielle

Past: February 17 → May 14, 2023

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.

1605a miriam cahn liegen 1. 13.10.96 1996 1920x1581 1 medium
Miriam Cahn, liegen, 1. + 13.10.96, 1996, Huile sur toile, 20.5 x 25.5 cm Courtesy de l’artiste et de la Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, photo : François Doury

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.

“ An exhibition is a work in itself and I see it as a performance.”

Miriam Cahn

16 Trocadéro Zoom in 16 Trocadéro Zoom out

13, av. du Président Wilson

75016 Paris

T. 01 81 97 35 88

www.palaisdetokyo.com

Alma – Marceau
Boissière
Iéna

Opening hours

Every day except Tuesday, noon – midnight
Closed on tuesday

Admission fee

Full rate €12.00 — Concessions €9.00

Free admission under 18 years-old, job seekers, those in receipt of income support…

Venue schedule

The artist

  • Miriam Cahn