Lenbachhaus Munich | Maria Jarema: Freedom in times of extremes

Exhibition view, Maria Jarema. Revolutionary Commissioner of Abstraction, Lenbachhaus 2026, all works: © Legal successor of the artist Photo: Lenbachhaus The revolution wears bangs. If you follow the thesis of a large national daily newspaper that women with short front hair are currently emblematic of the progressive, even revolutionary camp - Heidi Reichinnek, Elif Eralp, Kerstin Wolter - the Polish artist Maria Jarema would fit perfectly into the picture. With her coat billowing, her booted legs rammed into the ground, the fringes of her pony peeking out from under the peak of a worker's hat - that's how the theater maker Tadeusz Kantor drew her in 1990.

In the end, fashion features were alien to the artist, who was born in 1908 in what was then Austria-Hungary. What makes Maria Jarema so startlingly relevant today is her art, which, in pictures, sculptures and theater costumes, cares about people and the premises of a dignified and free life. In the exhibition “Maria Jarema: Revolutionary Commissioner of Abstraction” at the Lenbachhaus in Munich – named after Kantor’s sketch title – her works of art show us the horrors of civilizational losses with playful, distorted, deformed urgency. Brutalization, war, deprivation of freedom - dangers that threaten again today.

The basic prerequisite for her diverse work, which ranged from painting to sculpture to theater, was the state of freedom. Freedom from coercion. Freedom from guidelines, fashions, schools. The freedom of thought. But also a freedom that did not manifest itself in the narcissistic arrogance of an artistic genius, but always remained connected to the world and its suffering.

Anyone who looks at her works, which seem to be in constant movement and thus freely developing, asks themselves why this artist, who was also able to identify the core of her artistic work in her speeches, is so little known in Germany. At the Fine Arts Conference in Nieborów, Poland, in 1949, Maria Jarema stated quite simply: "Restricting the freedom of the arts is nonsense, because it destroys it." Rather, art is subject to constant change: in forms, materials, techniques. This spirit is always present in the Munich exhibition.

Already in the entrance area we come across black and white figures whose falling, falling and disappearing are often broken. Muscle packs of headless figurines can be seen virtually skinned, as in Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds. A woman's body with surrealistically distorted breasts lies on the ground. Human studies full of vulnerability. One step further, we see hand puppets designed by Jarema for pieces from the experimental theater project Cricot, which her brother Józef launched in Krakow in 1932. For example, Joseph Goebbels with his nose smashed.

Jarema became politically active early on after she was accepted into the art academy at the famous Jagiellonian University in Kraków in 1929. In 1932 she founded the Grupa Krakowska (Krakow Group) with artist friends to protest against the national-conservative orientation of the art academy. After the war she opposed the doctrine of socialist realism.

She experienced the war itself in the form of the German occupation in Krakow and narrowly escaped a mass shooting in 1943. The picture “Niemcy” (German) from 1941 shows the penetration of war into everyday life in an obvious dichotomy, marked by a blue line. On the left you can see people in stylishly wallpapered interiors, while on the right soldiers approach; One man's rifle already penetrates the blue dividing line, the boundary of the house.

Maria Jarema, always in resonance with European modern art, found freedom in times of extremes. In 1956, another theater project, Cricot 2, was created in collaboration with Tadeusz Kantor and Kazimierz Mikulski, a director and painter close to surrealism.

Two productions, “The Squid” by Stanisław Witkiewicz and “Circus” by Mikulski, can be seen in the exhibition in the form of auratic black and white films and show how a theater that celebrates life can be created with the smallest of resources - a small stage, worn curtains, few props, but Maria Jarema's eccentric costumes. Why the projections are only mounted at knee height, so that anyone who wants to see the film excerpts in their entirety is exposed to the risk of a herniated disc, remains a mystery of the exhibition concept.

In the years before her early death - Jarema died of leukemia in 1958 - she was enthusiastic about kinetic art, i.e. moving paintings that she had discovered in Paris. Jarema tried to achieve the effect, which was actually created mechanically in the Paris works, using painterly means alone. In particular, her involvement with the technique of monotype, a type of printing process without a printing press, produced intense works that directly affected the viewer. Her black-and-white hatched “figures” from 1953 seem to be fighting wildly with each other if they weren’t internally connected to each other by two red surfaces. A fight or rather a loving embrace?

Maria Jarema is a discovery. Her work has the effect of what she herself once wrote about art in general: "Like planets slumbering on walls, paintings explode upon contact with the contents of the human psyche - a result of transformation that, since this phenomenon is foreign to us, we might describe as 'chemical': explosions of feelings."

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