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A painting by Swiss artist Miriam Cahn went viral this past weekend after many on social media misconstrued it for an image of a sex act between a child and an adult.
The work, titled fuck abstraction !, was one of 200 on view in Cahn’s current exhibition at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, one of her biggest shows to date. The survey followed her appearance in the Venice Biennale last summer.
The painting shows a muscular figure with an erect penis being fellated by a kneeling nude figure who is smaller and who has their hands bound. The muscular figure holds another person’s head using a free hand.
Over the weekend, the French talk show host Karl Zéro, who has previously tweeted about what he calls “pedocrime,” posted a picture of the work to Twitter, calling it “intolerable.” In a follow-up tweet, Zéro wrote, “School groups visit this exhibition. Imagine the children’s questions when faced with this painting.”