Maria Jarema (1908–1958) was a painter, sculptor, art critic, co-founder of the Kraków Group and the Cricot Theatre, and a creator of stage designs, costumes, puppets, monumental projects, and book covers. From the beginning of her artistic career, she positioned herself within international modernism, adopting its shared language of post-Cubist abstraction while drawing on surrealism and expressionism.

Maria Jarema began experimenting with monotype in 1949, refusing to submit to the dictates of socialist realism and entering a period of inner exile until 1954. The artist’s work can be understood as an exploration of the various situations in which the body and the subject find themselves: from individual experience to relationships within couples and families, and ultimately to functioning within a broader community. The exhibition is therefore organized along this expanding scale—individual, duos, family, multitude—showing how social tensions, as well as processes of fragmentation and rupture of the self, emerge in representations of the body.

The exhibition also features works by Polish, French, Swiss, and Italian artists with whom Jarema maintained a dialog marked by conflict. Created by Maurice Estève, Alfred Manessier, Pierre Tal Coat, and Jean-Michel Atlan, the nine works by artists of the New School of Paris, on loan from the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, echo the Polish artist’s stays in Paris in 1937, 1947, and 1956–1957.