Maria Jarema : Cracked Modernism

The catalog of the first international monographic exhibition on Maria Jarema, curated by Éric de Chassey and Natalia Sielewicz, in the new premises of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. This exhibition will introduce international audiences to the avant-garde and multifaceted work of Maria Jarema (1908–1958), one of the most important figures of the interwar and postwar avant-garde in Eastern Europe. Jarema was a painter, sculptor, art writer, cofounder of the Krakow Group and the Cricot Theatre, and creator of theater sets, costumes, puppets, dolls, monumental designs, and book covers. She is one of the most important Polish artists of the twentieth century, a conscious participant in the European avant-garde, and a pioneer of emancipation. Her singular blending of abstraction and figuration, subjectivity and collective experiences, and embodiment and dismemberment calls for a new discussion. It also raises the question of how the achievements of women artists from Eastern Europe, who fought not only for the autonomy of art but also for its social commitment, can be brought back into the public sphere.