Miriam Cahn Frieze London 2026
For Frieze London 2026, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff is pleased to present ALTICH
(OLD I), a monumental 24-part room installation by Swiss artist Miriam
Cahn, bringing together works made between 1974 and 2020.
The Rauminstallation — the artist’s term for an indivisible installation of paintings and drawings presented within a single room — holds a special place in Cahn’s practice. By bringing works together within a defined space, she constructs a narrative composed of multiple chapters and layers of meaning. This particular installation revisits recurring themes in her work: the female body, particularly the aging female body, as well as armed conflict and its aftermath, focusing on those left with no choice but to flee or perish.
Many of the images share a distinctive visual register: full-length portraits of aging or wounded naked women who stare back at the viewer, their expressions conveying bewilderment or, at times, an unmistakably ironic smile. Their identities and origins remain unknown, yet some carry weapons, as if ready to fight, confronting the viewer with their gaze. These figures have appeared throughout Cahn’s work for decades. Here, however, their titles reveal what distinguishes them: the artist merges her own identity with that of the Kriegerin-Ich (“warrior me”), making this identification explicit.
Cahn pushes this identification further by reflecting on her own relationship to aging and to violence inflicted upon the body. In one work, she incorporates memories of her mother; in another, she superimposes two faces—one belonging to the past, the other to the future—suggesting a body suspended between memory and its inevitable transformation. The ensemble is thus shaped by the tension between perception and experience: “What I see is not what I am feeling.”
To extend this investigation into identity and representation, Cahn includes one of her earliest paintings: a realist self-portrait made in 1974, depicting herself in the act of painting. It stands as a testament to her lifelong commitment to her practice and brings the installation back to where it all began: life as art, with the figure of a woman painter investigating what the body retains and the ways in which lived experience—such as conflict— leaves its mark upon it.
Over the last three decades, Miriam Cahn has created around 20 room installations, grouping series of works across multiple media around a dedicated theme and a specific timeframe, ranging from a few days to several years. These installations have been presented at documenta 7 and 14, the Venice Biennale in 2022, and in seminal solo exhibitions, notably at the Palais de Tokyo in 2023, the Stedelijk in 2024 and the MAAT Lisbon in 2025. ALTICH will be presented as part of Miriam Cahn’s major solo exhibition at the Munchmuseet in Oslo, opening in November 2027.