Miriam Cahn was born to affluence in Basel, Switzerland, in 1949. Her father was an art dealer, her mother a homemaker. Cahn studied graphic arts and then taught drawing, but in the mid-70s, after her sister committed suicide, she left teaching to be an artist. A feminist from the start, Cahn was influence by performance art of the 60s and 70s and has since used the naked body as a way to make statements about sex, violence, and the nuclear family. For a time her own works were performative, but in the 1990s she turned to the pictorial. Cahn creates images of humans who look shorn, ghost-like, irradiated, as if the figures harbor a half-life of knowledge or pain that’s left them phosphorescent. —Elena Clavarino