"Painting was dead in the sense that the situation, the world situation. What it meant for me was that I had to start from scratch as if painting didn’t exist… The issue for me was: What are we going to paint? The old stuff was out. It was no longer meaningful. These things were no longer relevant in a moral crisis (…) The world was going to pot." Barnett Newman. The exhibition is scheduled to open on 19 February 2027.

For the first time in Poland, we will present the work of Barnett Newman (1905–1970), one of the most important artists of the 20th century who revolutionized modern art. His monumental, abstract paintings, pierced by his characteristic "zips," emerged from the experience of humanity’s crisis following the Holocaust, totalitarian regimes, and the looming threat of nuclear war. Works selected for the exhibition, will showcase as an attempt to give form to suffering, fear, and emptiness—elements that, after World War II, required new modes of representation.

Newman, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, maintained a close connection with the Jewish world throughout his artistic career and brought a new perspective to abstract art, one rooted in Jewish tradition. Although he did not experience the Holocaust directly, he was deeply affected by the tragic fate of European Jews and frequently referenced it in his paintings. His art, will be presented for the first time in a place where part of this history unfolded—here in Warsaw, in Muranów, a site of tragedy that not only shaped modern Jewish identity but also profoundly influenced Newman himself—as a Jew, an artist, and a philosopher.

Barnett Newman, "Right Here". Photo: Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam