WARSAW.- Since the opening of its new building in October 2024 the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw has welcomed over 800,000 guests. In 2025, the exhibitions, accompanying events, cinema and educational program attracted nearly 530,000 visitors to MSN Warsaw.

Ten new exhibitions await audiences in 2026, including single-person shows of works by Julie Mehretu, Maria Jarema and Edward Dwurnik. The plans include a sweeping presentation of global sculpture and an international exhibition on Surrealism. We also invite audiences to participate in the museum’s expanded public program, cinema and educational offerings. The museum’s branches—the Hansen House in Szumin, the Dance Pavilion, and the Bródno Sculpture Park—will also be hard at work.

“MSN Warsaw seeks to offer access to knowledge about worldwide artistic life, trends, debates and ideas within a solid program based on a broad network of institutional cooperation and careful research,” said MSN Warsaw director Joanna Mytkowska. “On the other hand, with immersion in local artistic life and civic debate, the institution will resonate with the evolving circumstances and emotions, as a platform for discussion. In 2026 we plan to expand this deliberative character in building the museum’s program. First and foremost, we invite diverse organizations and individuals to contribute to shaping this program in the free-admission spaces on the ground floor. The exhibitions are also structured in a similar spirit. The new shows, dialoguing with one another, should make a visit to the museum an unforgettable experience of the pulse of modernity—multifaceted, intense, sometimes chaotic, but also offering signposts.”

Julie Mehretu and Maria Jarema in March

In the early spring museum audiences will witness two major one-woman shows devoted to artists who have redefined the language of abstraction: Julie Mehretu (born in 1970) and Maria Jarema (1908–1958). Mehretu is one of the most influential contemporary American painters, who drenches her paintings with an intense political element. Her monumental works interweave gesture, history and memory of place into multifaceted abstract compositions. This exhibition is being shown in conjunction with the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, with significant loans of works from the Pinault Collection. The curators are Joanna Mytkowska and Szymon Żydek (MSN Warsaw), based on a concept developed by Susanne Gaensheimer and Sebastian Peter (K21), in close cooperation with Studio Julie Mehretu. The exhibition of Maria Jarema on the same floor, curated by Éric de Chassey (Beaux-Arts de Paris) and Natalia Sielewicz (MSN Warsaw), will take a fresh look at one of the most original figures in Polish modernism from the inter-war and post-war periods. A conscious participant in the European avant-garde and a pioneer of women’s liberation, Jarema freely crossed the boundaries between disciplines, redefining the role of the artist in public life. Mehretu and Jarema share a belief that abstract art does not have to mean a cold autonomy or detachment from the reality around us, despite the generations and different geographical contexts dividing them. What is at stake in their art is a transformation of life and the perception of the world.

From 27 to 29 March MSN Warsaw also invites audiences to a presentation of artistic video and film from South Korea, prepared in conjunction with MMCA Seoul and curated by Sebastian Cichocki and Soojung LI.

Two shows in June

The beginning of summer will witness the opening of You Are in the Heart of Change: Surrealism and Anti-fascism, a far-reaching international exhibition first shown from October 2024 to March 2025 at the Lenbachhaus in Munich under the title But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Anti-fascism, prepared by the curatorial team of Stephanie Weber, Adrian Djukić and Karin Althaus. The show of works by such artists as Hans Bellmer, Erna Rosenstein, Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Paul Éluard, Lee Miller, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and Toyen combines international elements (shown previously in Munich) and Polish aspects. The curators Dorota Jarecka and Magda Lipska are cooperating on this project with the curators from Lenbachhaus as well as Paweł Polit from Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. The audience will have an opportunity to trace remarkable events and international solidarity linking Prague with Coyoacán in Mexico City; Cairo with Republican Spain; Marseille with Fort-de-France, Martinique; Puerto Rico and Paris with Chicago. The aim is to convey Surrealism as a network—the political and international movement that its protagonists considered it to be.

In the exhibition Black Roads into the White Continent, curator Oliwia Mimi Bosomtwe draws on the art and visual culture of the Polish People’s Republic to examine depictions of Polish relationships with Blackness and Sub-Saharan Africa. It is a story of fact, fantasy, imagination, and the contest between ideas and reality. The show conveys an impression of several decades in which art, politics and ethnography mixed to form a confusing web of interests entangled in ideals of socialist post-colonialism. The project also attempts to draw attention to an alternative narrative about an era that gave rise to African diasporas in Poland.

Edward Dwurnik, Art Worker, in July

This exhibition on one of the most important Polish painters of the 20th century focuses on Dwurnik’s works from the 1970s and 80s and the presentation of two major series of paintings, Sportsmen and Workers. Curator Łukasz Ronduda was driven by the desire to reconstruct the source of Dwurnik’s artistic attitude, formed in the late 60s and early 70s, which was characterized by great empathy, the battle against elitism in art, and links with the work of outsiders, and which shaped his conception of painting as a documentation of the life of the society.

Sculpture in September

This presentation of contemporary sculptural practices, curated by Jagna Lewandowska and Szymon Maliborski, will occupy not only the exhibition galleries but also the arcades around the MSN Warsaw building. The show brings together primarily works by women artists, for whom the point of departure is the disintegration of form, and who treat sculpture as a balance of powers—flows, changes, and the tension between the process and the finished piece. The allusions in the works to biological forms, associated with the body, draw attention to sculpture as an impermanent structure, susceptible to modifications. The artists presented will include June Crespo, Dominique White, Teresa Solar Abboud, Giulia Cenci, Edith Karlson, Iza Tarasewicz and Gizela Mickiewicz, among others.

Late September and early October at MSN Warsaw will be an opportunity to participate in the events, meetings and discussions prepared by Jakub Depczyński, Joanna Erbel and Alicja Wójcik as part of the Warsaw Under Construction festival.

Not just galleries—two works in the staircase

The exhibitions described above will dialogue with new artworks which will hang in 2026 in the space of the museum’s staircase. In March we will view there a work by Minh-Lan Tran, a draped painting/installation falling like a broken scroll, composed of patches of latex, silk and canvas which respond to light like a membrane. In the second half of the year, a new work by the Italian artist Giulia Cenci will be featured in the staircase.

Young Polish art in Gallery A

MSN Warsaw is continuing its mission of making art accessible to as broad an audience as possible, including free of charge, which is made possible by Gallery A, found on the museum’s ground floor and entirely visible from ul. Marszałkowska. It is essential for the museum to maintain a close connection with the Polish art world, and thus throughout 2026, on the ground floor, visitors will encounter works by experimental Polish artists of the younger generation. An exhibition will open on 28 January, curated by Łukasz Ronduda, titled Misterioso, by Nadia Markiewicz, an artist interested in creating a new image of disability in terms such as mystery and uniqueness. In April there will be the first institutional show of works by Przemysław Piniak, an intermedia artist who died last year in his 30s (curators Szymon Maliborski, Gabriela Skrzypczak, Przemysław Sowiński). In July, Gallery A will show paintings by Adam Kozicki, an artist inspired by the nervous rhythm of the contemporary internet (curator Natalia Sielewicz).