Miriam Cahn was awarded the 14th Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen on June, 26th, 2022, an honour that is combined with a solo exhibition at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen.

Since the beginnings of her artistic development during the 1970s, Miriam Cahn has adopted a consciously feminist and self-determined standpoint. Starting out from drawing and completely unfettered by academic rules, Cahn has produced a painterly œuvre of immense expressive power, also incorporating other artistic forms such as writing, photography, filming and sculptural work.

The focus of her interest is mankind, the fragility of the human body as well as its relationship to nature: to animals, plants and landscapes. Personal experiences, family memories and present-day observations are combined with socio-political events. Womanhood, gender, love, sexuality, violence, anti-Semitism, war and flight are recurring themes in her work. Uncompromisingly, Cahn confronts the viewer with her view of the unspeakable, demanding a close look and a profound engagement with the many contradictions of our world.

The exhibition MEINEJUDEN, marking the award of the 14th Rubens Prize from the City of Siegen, offers a comprehensive overview of Miriam Cahn’s multifaceted œuvre. In fourteen rooms conceived especially for the purpose by the artist, she presents important groups of works and installations from the last five decades, but also includes numerous new works. In addition to expressive, intensely colourful paintings, the exhibition presents floor-to-ceiling chalk drawings, works on paper in pastels and watercolours, sculptures, performative videos, early sketchbooks and texts written by the artist. Picking up the exhibition title she selected, in her current works the Rubens Prize winner deals once more with the fact of being Jewish.