Maria Jarema: Cracked Modernism
Minh Lan Tran: Spine
March 20–June 28, 2026
Warsaw 00–110
Poland
The exhibitions Julie Mehretu: Kairos / Hauntological Variations, Maria Jarema: Cracked Modernism, and Minh Lan Tran: Spine open on March 20, 2026 at MSN Warsaw. They present the works of three women artists engaged in the world, representatives of different generations, nationalities and histories, whose work is linked by the language of abstraction. From Julie Mehretu’s large-scale canvases and Maria Jarema’s monotypes, to the monumental installation created by Minh Lan Tran for the staircase as the museum, this is a journey through the legacy of American Expressionism, European Modernism, and abstract painting entering into direct dialogue with architecture.
The exhibitions of Julie Mehretu and Maria Jarema are the latest examples of international cooperation by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw with major global cultural institutions. The Mehretu show is created in cooperation with Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, with major loans from the Pinault Collection. It is curated by Szymon Żydek, based on a concept developed by Susanne Gaensheimer and Sebastian Peter (K21), in close cooperation with Studio Julie Mehretu. The show of Maria Jarema, presented on the same floor, is prepared by Natalia Sielewicz and Éric de Chassey (Beaux-Arts de Paris) and will next go to the Lenbachhaus museum in Munich.
Abstraction—an instrument of artistic emancipation and experimentation
“Despite the generations dividing them and the differing geographical contexts, Mehretu and Jarema share a belief that abstraction doesn’t have to mean cold autonomy or rejection of the surrounding reality,” says Natalia Sielewicz, MSN Warsaw’s chief curator and co-curator of the Maria Jarema exhibition. “What is at stake is the transformation of life and the perception of the world. For both of these artists, art is a living system of relations—dynamic, open, and unfinished—where meaning is generated in the encounter between gesture and material, art and reality, the image and the viewer.”
Julie Mehretu, born in 1970 in Ethiopia, is an American artist with Polish roots, and one of the most influential painters of her generation. She imbues abstraction with an intense political element. Her monumental paintings interweave gesture, history, and memory of place into multilayered compositions. Often the point of departure for her work is architectural and cartographic drawings—maps, city plans, zones of conflict—on which the artist builds complex layers of signs, friction and blurring, suggestive of the movement of crowds, migrations and revolutions. For Mehretu, abstraction is not an escape from the world but a method for experiencing it—painting oscillating between testimony, rhythm and landscape.
The Jarema exhibition, presented immediately adjacent to the Mehretu show, takes a fresh look at one of the most original figures in Polish modernism of the inter-war and post-war periods. Maria Jarema (1908–1958) was a painter, sculptor, art critic, cofounder of the Kraków Group and the Cricot theater, creator of set designs, costumes, puppets, monumental projects, and book covers, as well as an actor. During the post-war period, she radically opposed the doctrine of Socialist Realism, demanding artistic freedom.
Jarema called for a new way of looking at the world and art. Her monotypes from the 1950s pulse with rhythm and corporeality, creating what the artist called an “artistic lexicon,” a new idiom of forms born of the very act of creation. The exhibition provides a deeper understanding of Jarema’s individual practice and creative process by presenting her work alongside pieces by Polish, French, Swiss and Italian artists whom she admired and whose achievements she confronted. But she refused to abandon her own voice. As Maria Jarema said, “Without deformation, transposition, metaphor, abstraction, we cannot grasp or express the escalating conflicts of feelings and issues.”
Minh Lan Tran (born in 1997 in Hong Kong), whose practice extends to painting, writing, and performance art, is creating a monumental installation in the staircase at MSN Warsaw, constructed out of a single 19-meter sheet of natural latex. Suspended in space, the work will function as a translucent membrane, responsive to light, gravity and movement, through which the artist reflects on the boundary between life and death, materiality and energy. The choice of latex alludes to the history of rubber production in Vietnam under French colonial rule, where plantations functioned as sites of intense exploitation. These materials, shaped by processes of extraction, labor and transformation, place Tran’s work within the broader context of colonial brutality and ecological exploitation. The artist’s creative gestures, such as tearing, burning, stitching, incising and erasing, are a form of leaving inscriptions and also repairing—and thus remain suspended between care and violence.
All three of these women artists worked, or continue to work, both within and in conflict with traditions of abstract art dominated by men. For all three, the essence of art lies not in illustration or depiction, but in the act of encounter with the audience—their engagement in what they see and feel and what will remain with them. In Mehretu’s large-format canvases, signs swirl and dissipate; in Jarema’s monotypes, figures flicker, appearing and disappearing on the verge of legibility; and on Tran’s translucent sheet of latex, traces of shellac, earth, fire, charcoal and pigment form pulsing splotches and marks. All three artists dissolve fixed forms, transforming painting into a temporal and performative space—reclaiming for abstraction that which is most political. These three perspectives on abstract art also offer three methods for sensitizing viewers to the plasticity of art.
The exhibition Julie Mehretu, Kairos / Hauntological Variations is organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in cooperation with Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, with key borrowings from the Pinault Collection. It is based on a concept developed by Susanne Gaensheimer and Sebastian Peter (K21), in close cooperation with Studio Julie Mehretu.
The curators of Maria Jarema, Cracked Modernism, Natalia Sielewicz and Éric de Chassey, would like to express their huge thanks to the artist’s family for their engagement and assistance in preparing the exhibition. The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw would also like to thank the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art.
