Although her work climaxes in Cubism, the artistic career of Marcelle Cahn (Strasbourg 1895 – 1981 Neuilly-sur-Seine) coincides largely with the development of European painting of the 20th century. As a member of the artist group “Cercle et Carré (Mondrian, Arp, Léger, Kandinsky, etc.), that obliged to a strict puristic Constructivism, Marcelle Cahn develops abstract compositions, characterized through cylinder, circles and rectangles which show a striking and clean rhythm. Through the collage-medium she accomplishes to combine abstraction and figuration. In 1971, Michael Seuphor writes there to: "Marcelle Cahn’s collages are a sort of theatre without a curtain, without characters, without a subject but nevertheless full of surprises. I have been subject to their charm for a long time. It never disappoints. No matter what form these works take- some are miniatures- they are monumental ; the eye of the beholder sees them as huge."
This thrilling late work emerges around 1960, and is determined through a soft, personal and intimate use of forms.
The works of Marcelle Cahn engage in a dialogue with the works of the Austrian artist Tina Lechner (born in 1981 in St. Pölten). She concentrates on classic analog photography. After a long process of creation with her own requisites, she develops her black and white photographies in her studio. In detailed sequences she creates sculptures, inorganic bodily objects out of paper, which overlap the bodies of her female models. The model or subject becomes an object. Tina Lechner’s photographies give a fresh and new interpretation of classic photographic aesthetics within existing traditions.
