Miriam Cahn, What Looks at Me

curated by Cristiana Perrella

The first major museum retrospective in Italy dedicated to the Swiss artist marks the central moment of the museum’s 2026 programme.

11 June – 15 November 2026

MACRO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma

via Niza 138 – 00198 Rome

ww.mueomacro.it

MACRO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma presents What Looks at Me, the first major museum retrospective in Italy dedicated to Miriam Cahn, curated by the museum’s artistic director Cristiana Perrella. Open to the public from 11 June to 15 November 2026, the exhibition stands as the centrepiece of MACRO’s 2026 programme, promoted by the Department of Culture of 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 essential voices in international contemporary art. Her work — primarily painting, drawing and pastel — spans more than fifty years of practice with rare ethical and formal coherence. The human body, violence, desire, vulnerability and war form the core of an artistic language that rejects both the aestheticisation of pain and any form of compromise. Despite growing international recognition in recent years — from the Venice Biennale to retrospectives at the Palais de Tokyo and the Museo Reina Sofía — a comprehensive exhibition within a major Italian institution had until now been missing.

The exhibition at MACRO occupies the museum’s main gallery, a space of approximately 1,400 square metres, and brings together more than 100 works spanning the artist’s entire career, from the late 1970s to her most recent productions. Rather than following a chronological order, the exhibition unfolds through thematic constellations that reveal the continuity of Cahn’s formal and political obsessions: the representation of the female body, the denunciation of wartime violence, and eroticism as an act of resistance.

The exhibition design has been conceived by Didier Fiúza Faustino // Bureau des Mésarchitectures. A conceptual artist and Franco-Portuguese architect, Fiúza Faustino explores the relationship between body and space. Situated at the intersection of art and architecture, his multidisciplinary practice — ranging from installation and experimentation to the creation of sensory environments — enters into dialogue with Cahn’s work within the exhibition space.

MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma

Roma, via Nizza, 138