WARSAW.- Two concurrent exhibitions, The Woman Question 1550–2025 and The City of Women, launch MSN Warsaw’s second year of operations in its new building. Nearly 200 women artists from around the world, from Artemisia Gentileschi and Angelika Kauffmann, through Tamara Łempicka, Frida Kahlo and Eva Hesse, to Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Leonor Antunes, Yoko Ono and Tala Madani. Five centuries of art by women, a display of their commitment and the force of feminist initiatives—The Woman Question and The City of Women offer a fresh retelling of art history, leading to a revision of the so-called canon and undermining the accepted view that before the 20th century women artists were rare exceptions.

The Woman Question was prepared by the curator and art historian Alison M. Gingeras, who is familiar to MSN Warsaw audiences from the hugely successful show The Dark Arts: Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism which she co-curated. The other exhibition on view at the same time, The City of Women, comprises four separate parts assembled by another group of curators and researchers. Gutsy: On Feminist Infrastructures is curated by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Other Tomorrows by Michalina Sablik and Vera Zalutskaya, Her Heart by Karolina Gembara, and We Were There: International Women’s Year 1975 by Wiktoria Szczupacka.

The Woman Question and The City of Women carry forward a new feminist narrative previously explored at MSN Warsaw in such exhibitions as The Dark Arts: Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism; A Tiger Came into the Garden: Art of Maria Prymachenko; Paint, Also Known as Blood: Women, Affect, and Desire in Contemporary Painting; and Who Will Write the History of Tears: Artists on Women’s Rights. Both of these new exhibitions are also the result of the museum’s international collaborations. Audiences will view works never before shown in Poland, borrowed from numerous global institutions, including the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Accademia San Luca in Rome, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, Kröller Müller Museum in Otterlo, and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau in Munich among others.