Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger

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Like heat maps for sensation, it could be unendurable cheese, e.g. "the red stands for love" but its  their tenuous walk over the chasm of schmaltz that feels like its relationship to horror - the body's ability to fall into a meat grinder or sentimentality, crushed like Precious Moments figurines. There's something so fragile about our ability to feel empathy, to feel tender. We're stupid creatures that are easy to break. The ability for Cahn to at any moment move firmly into the world of melodrama feels as much a threat as violence, she could destroy them with a heart emoji.

Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger

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Cahn is important, perhaps like Andrew Wekua, in the age of the digital euphemising the body, that someone retensions connection to our corporeality. The body is battleground of artists deciding how to represent it back to us. An artist can drop it from a height over and over again and care nothing for it if they so wish. Cahn seems to care, even while suspending its pink people over the sandpaper causticness of its abrasive color, one of a very few painters to make painting's bright beauty a violent thing. and against people like rubbed erasers, pink and sensitive worn forms. Painting can do a real violence to balloons filled with red liquid. Rubbed of noses, devoid of hair, flesh the color of factory chicken skin. The manifold meanings of the adjective tender, "showing gentleness" as well as "sensitive to pain."  "(of meat) easy to cut."



See too: Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff, Group Show at Meyer Riegger, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Tala Madani at David Kordansky,  Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Group Show at Meyer Riegger

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We'll just list some decent work in this exhib: Mauser's crushed can Kobros, Saâdane Afif's baroque citational posters, Salvo's pre-Nicolas Party awkward, Posenenske's tableaus, Armleder's power-farts, etc.
But can we talk about that Miriam Cahn painting. Jesus. Attaining that magic otherness of "outsider" artists without actually being so. Soft horror, childlike and maternal. A crepuscular thumb indeterminate. The marks seem to stand more for actions than depiction, as in a face constructed of movements against it, but way less theatrical than Bacon. of the horror of our features removed, of the loss of the container, flesh. Such gentle, tender, violence.

Nicolas Party at Gregor Staiger , Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff , Group Show at David Kordasky