Cahn's paintings and drawings incorporate feminism themes and female rituals; featuring "violent and shocking representations of sexual organs". They are often created using unorthodox methods. Cahn's first exhibition was Being a Women in My Public Role in 1979. Cahn's first exhibition in the United States was at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York City, in 2011. Cahn's work has been said to show influence by the Neo-Expressionism movement. At first glance, most of the motifs used by Miriam Cahn appear unspectacular,: people, buildings, animals, plants, some in bright or even garish colours, some in gloomy shades of black and grey. Despite such conservative motifs, Cahn is known as a feminist who likes a fight, who often quotes the line ‘your body is a battleground’ from Barbara Kruger’s Untitled and who withdrew her works from Documenta 7 in 1982 because she felt she had been unfairly treated by the artistic director Rudi Fuchs. The artist deconstructs her conservative motifs from the inside out. The dreamy-looking watercolours from a 1985–91 series turn out to be studies of atomic explosions. Here, the horror – whose actual violence simply cannot be portrayed – is depicted as a child’s rainbow dress, which only amplifies its awe-inspiring quality. Some of the more recent large-format paintings show naked people in garish, pulsating colours, albeit devoid of any pornographic reference, as well as country landscapes and abstract geometric shapes. The installation of these paintings was broken up by small drawings of tanks, clenched fists and rolling pins with sharp blades. It’s as if violence were always already lurking in the cracks and joints between supposedly pacified zones. Cahn’s figures are often surrounded by a shadowy, atmospheric band of colour, a diffuse aura that mediates between the motifs and the colourful non-figurative backgrounds. Such aura outlines are familiar from works as diverse as Wassily Kandinsky’s Dame in Moscow and Mel Ramos’s Nudes. Kandinsky used such outlines to symbolize the astral body of theosophy, and Ramos describes his pin-ups as fantasy beings, but Cahn’s glowing body haloes have a different meaning. Traditionally, the hard, ‘masculine’ outline served to set figures apart from their surroundings and to establish them as self-identical individuals. Cahn, by contrast, creates transitions rather than borders; diffusion rather than difference. This approach applies to the sex scenes in the drawings in the series das klassische lieben. Hung in the basement, they show fragmented bodies in a process of dissolution, wedged together, merging into one another, pulsing with an energy between passion and violence. It is as if Cahn deliberately placed these works here, in the guts of the Kunstverein, while upstairs, in the colourful paintings, a deceptive calm prevails.
Jörg Scheller describes Cahn as a "feminist who likes to fight." Schorgg comments that Cahn's pieces have a tone he describes as a "deceptive calm", though Export et al. note the "wild sketching" as a key element to the tension between cultural influences in her work. In 1998 Cahn won the Käthe Kollwitz Prize awarded by the Academy of Arts, Berlin.
