Is a Nude Painting of a Woman Still Erotic If She Looks Back?

I’m sharing this video I watched today in which the Swiss artist Miriam Cahn talks about her work. I saw a number of her works at the Venice Biennale this year and it inspired me to find out more about her. She’s not an artist I knew of before, and I’m delighted to have found her. The video is about 10 minutes long and packed to the rafters with interesting ideas.

She’s a feminist artist, she’s fiercely political, and she tackles taboo subjects head-on. The role of the artist for her is to express things that people are afraid to say, or won’t say, and to expose the lies that circulate in democracies.

Her work isn’t easy to look at and it’s not beautiful, for me anyway. But it communicates something real.

She talks about how it is incumbent on female artists to create a new tradition that represents women differently from how they have been shown in art from the past. Those representations were largely produced by men. Women need to be shown as they really are, not how men would like them to be. That’s a task for female artists, and she’s fully signed up to it.