The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw presents "The Woman Question 1550-2025," a major exhibition curated by Alison Gingeras that dismantles the myth that women have only recently become artists. Featuring 199 works spanning centuries, the show includes pieces by Lubaina Himid, Alina Szapocznikow, Gina Birch, Macena Barton, Betty Tompkins, and Artemisia Gentileschi, among others. The exhibition is organized into nine chapters examining themes such as Baroque women, motherhood, and war, and is accompanied by a catalogue with contributions from museum director Joana Mytkowska and other scholars.
This exhibition matters because it directly confronts the systemic exclusion of women from art historical narratives, a process that art historians like Ernst Gombrich and H.W. Janson helped institutionalize. By presenting women artists as continuous presences rather than exceptions, the show offers a transhistorical counterpoint to patriarchal art history. Its urgency is heightened by the current global rise in anti-women rhetoric and legal changes, making the exhibition both a scholarly intervention and a timely political statement about women's agency and artistic practice.