Miriam Cahn. What Looks at Me

MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome presents Ciò che mi guarda (What Looks at Me), the first major museum retrospective in Italy dedicated to the artist Miriam Cahn, curated by the museum's artistic director Cristiana Perrella. Opening to the public from 11 June to 15 November 2026, the exhibition — produced with the support of Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia — represents the central focus of MACRO's 2026 program, promoted by the Assessorato alla Cultura di Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, and produced and organised by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo.

Born in Basel in 1949, Miriam Cahn is today recognised as one of the most urgent and compelling voices in international contemporary art. Her work — primarily painting, drawing and pastel, performance and installation — spans more than fifty years of practice, sustained by a rare ethical and formal coherence. The human body, violence, desire, vulnerability and war form the core concerns of an oeuvre that rejects both the aestheticisation of suffering and any form of compromise. Despite the growing international attention devoted to her work in recent years — from the Venice Biennale to major retrospectives at Palais de Tokyo and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía — a major survey exhibition in an Italian museum institution had until now yet to be realised.

The exhibition at MACRO designed by Didier Fiúza Faustino // Bureau des Mésarchitectures unfolds across the museum's main gallery and brings together more than 130 works spanning the artist's entire career, from the late 1970s to her most recent production. Rather than following a chronological order, the exhibition is structured through thematic constellations that bring works from different periods into dialogue, foregrounding the continuity of Cahn's artistic and political inquiry and the recurrence of her key concerns: the representation of the female body, the critique of wartime violence, and eroticism as an act of resistance.

The large-format charcoal and chalk drawings on paper from her early years enter into dialogue with the vividly coloured watercolours of the 1980s and early 1990s devoted to the Atombombe — the atomic bomb, with its still dramatic contemporary relevance — and with more recent paintings on canvas, revealing the enduring radicality of a visual language whose expressive force remains intact. The body lies at the centre of her painting — fragmented, exposed, resistant — rendered through an urgent, raw stroke deliberately removed from any notion of formal perfection.

A central element of the project is the room installations, an exhibition format that Miriam Cahn has employed since the 1980s and which remains one of the most distinctive aspects of her practice. These are not simple groupings of works, but autonomous constellations conceived as coherent units of meaning: each installation corresponds to a specific body of work, designed to dialogue within a precise spatial configuration. For Cahn, room installations function as a tool for thinking, or a way of expanding into space what a single painting cannot contain on its own.

On view at MACRO are Herumliegen (2022) and Familienraum (1996–2009). Conceived in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Herumliegen carries the full urgency of an immediate reaction to unfolding events: Cahn neither documents nor comments, but responds, with the same immediacy that has long defined her practice. The title, Herumliegen — "lying around", "scattered about" — evokes abandoned bodies, defenceless presences, and the merciless image of mass death. As the artist has stated in relation to her work on the war in Ukraine: "The repetition of violence during wars is not intended to shock, but to denounce."... read the rest of the article»