Miriam Cahn was born in 1949 in Basel where she grew up in a wealthy and cultured family. Her father is an art and antiques dealer. Her mother, a housewife, introduced her to drawing and music at a very youngest age.

After studying drawing at the Basel School of Applied Arts (1968-1973), Miriam Cahn worked as a drawing teacher and scientific draughtswoman until 1976. The suicide of her sister pushes her to become an independent artist.

She participates in the anti-nuclear movement and the women’s movement, especially as a delegate of the Organisation für die Sache der Frau (OFRA = Organization for the Cause of Women) at the Peace Congress in Warsaw

in 1976. From December 1979 to January 1980, she engaged in a night-time artistic action in which she covered the walls of the so-called northern tangent in Basel, a motorway bridge that was under construction at the time.

Her action of protest, which will be discovered by the police, will bring her to a lawsuit.

Miriam Cahn soon became known as an artist and was noticed on the international scene. Her first exhibition, held in Basel in 1977 at the Stampa Gallery, was followed by numerous other personal and group exhibitions, which quickly spread throughout Europe.

Miriam Cahn was invited in 1982 to the documenta 7, but she withdraws her contribution shortly before the inauguration because of a curatorial intervention of Rudi Fuchs, general curator of the exhibition. She participates in Venice Biennale in 1984, then lived in Berlin from 1985 to 1989, before returning to Basel. The PasquArt Centre in Biel devoted a major exhibition to her in 2002, the first to present a comprehensive overview of her paintings. This was followed in 2006 by the exhibition Miriam Cahn: Überdachte Fluchtwege at the Kirchner Museum in Davos.

After that, a certain silence settled over the artist in Switzerland. It was not until 2014 that the Centre culturel suisse in Paris presented the exhibition Miriam Cahn: corporel / körperlich, which was taken up by the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau and marked the

rediscovery of the artist. This will be followed in 2017 by his participation in documenta 14 in Athens and in Kassel. Several exhibitions will be held in 2019, sometimes at the same time, for example at the Kunsthaus Bregenz and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Miriam Cahn, who has received numerous awards for her work, now lives and works

in Stampa, in the Bregaglia Valley.

Public collections with works by Miriam Cahn: Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; Öffentliche

Kunstsammlung, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Kunstmuseum Bern; Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Stiftung, Davos; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt a. M.; Sammlung Kunstkredit, Archäologie und

Museum Baselland, Liestal; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum für

Moderne Kunst, Nürnberg; Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris;

Kunst(Zeug)Haus, Rapperswil; Kunsthaus Zürich; Graphische Sammlung der ETH, Zürich; Kunsthaus

Zug.