Letter from Joanna Mytkowska, director of MSN

The first full year of MSN Warsaw’s operations in the museum’s new building at ul. Marszałkowska 103 is now behind us. It was a year of rapid changes. The museum’s audience grew fourfold—since the opening in 2024 we have been visited by over 800,000 people, and in 2025 alone over 530,000—while the debate has also grown more heated. The museum began to present a diverse, dynamic program, also addressed to diverse audiences—exhibitions, but also meetings, workshops, educational initiatives, performances, and guided tours. The program of the in-house cinema Kinomuzeum is expanding. The Pavilion of Dance and Other Performative Arts launched in January 2026. Change has become the most permanent feature of MSN Warsaw’s identity. 

On one hand, MSN Warsaw is seeking stability as an institution of public trust. The solid program, grounded on objective research, provides access to knowledge about global artistic life, trends, debates and ideas. On the other hand, with its immersion in local artistic life and civic debate, the institution resonates with the evolving circumstances and emotions, in an effort to become a platform for discussion.

In 2026 we plan to expand this deliberative character in building the museum’s program—first and foremost by inviting diverse organizations and individuals to help create the program for the publicly accessible, free-admission space on the ground floor. The exhibition schedule for the new year is constructed in a similar spirit. Several new exhibitions, 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. Two exhibitions that opened last year are still underway: the monumental The Woman Question 1550–2025 and The City of Women. In mid-March 2026 we will open two one-woman shows, of Maria Jarema (1908–1958) and of Julie Mehretu, who was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa. Two visions of abstract painting and political engagement, from a Polish avant-gardist and from a multi-ethnic artist who has renewed American abstract expressionism and become one of the most influential artists of our times. In June, the exhibition You Are at the Heart of Change: Surrealism and Anti-fascism, prepared in conjunction with the Lenbachhaus in Munich, will come to MSN Warsaw, offering visitors masterpieces from the Surrealist tradition. A precise recounting of the links between Surrealist artists and resistance to the growing fascism of their time is not without its parallels to the contemporary political situation. In the second half of the year we will open a monographic exhibition of Edward Dwurnik (1943–2018), seeking a new interpretation of the sources of his art in folk culture and a new depiction of masculinity. In turn, an exhibition surveying contemporary sculptural language will map the achievements of the younger generation of Polish women sculptors and propose an alternative to painting as the dominant medium in artistic life.

This year, Gallery A on the ground floor (free admission) will present profiles of experimental Polish artists of the younger generation. Nadia Markiewicz’s exhibition Misterioso will open on 29 January. Subsequent shows in that space will feature Przemysław Piniak and Adam Kozicki. There will be another edition of the Warsaw Under Construction festival, with numerous events devoted to urban design and improving city spaces. The museum’s surroundings are also developing—this summer a sculpture by Dominika Olszowy, Monument of a Fountain, will be erected in the Central Square next to the MSN Warsaw building.