See below

Ma pensée sérielle

Miriam Cahn
From 17/02/2023 to 14/05/2023

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. Some works are likely to offend the public’s sensibilities.

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.

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

Miriam Cahn

From 17/02/2023 to 14/05/2023

Co-curators : Emma Lavigne, Marta Dziewańska 

Text : Emma Lavigne

 

To accompany this exhibition, two publications will be available in our bookstore: the exhibition catalog under the direction of Marta Dziewańska published by Flammarion and the book “Écrits de colère” published by Hatje Cantz.

WITH THE SUPPORT OF

MEDIA PARTNERS