We are delighted to present the solo exhibition The Principle of Chance by the artist Józef Jarema at our gallery in Berlin. The exhibition features a selection of abstract paintings created between the 1940s and 1960s, highlighting Jarema’s significant role within the post-war avant-garde movement in Europe.

Józef Jarema knew no boundaries, no barriers, no limits. He was multitalented, a go-getting, versatile creative who was never satisfied with just one thing; he was a networker and doer long before the word “networking” existed and “doing” was a virtue in art.

Born 1900 in Stary Sambor (then Austrian Galicia, today Ukraine), then moved 1918 to Kraków, where he studied painting. In 1924 he relocates to Paris, where he associates with artistic circles that included the dadaist and surrealist Louis Aragon. In 1931 he returned to Kraków, first founded the magazine Glos Plastyków (The Voice of the Plasticists), then the legendary avant-garde theater Cricot. He wrote experimental plays, staged absurdist literary performances, and appeared as an actor.

During World War II, Jarema made his way via Romania to the troops of the Polish general Władysław Anders. In 1939, immediately after Germany’s invasion of Poland, Anders was taken prisoner by the Soviets, who were allied with Hitler. When the Soviet Union was finally invaded by the German Wehrmacht itself in 1941, Stalin instructed the imprisoned Anders to form thousands of Polish prisoners of war in the Soviet Union into a mercenary army to fight the German troops.

This so-called Anders Army eventually won the 1944 Battle of Monte Cassino, where the Western Allies had previously suffered heavy losses and failed to capture the Nazi stronghold. Jarema was a soldier in action at this battle. Despite his participation in the war as an Anders combatant, he managed to participate in art exhibitions from 1941 to 1945 in Baghdad, Tel Aviv, and Kairo, where his unit was stationed in the meantime.

After World War II, Jarema did not return to Poland, but moved to Rome. As early as October 1945, together with the Futurist Enrico Prampolini, he founded the Art Club there, an association of intellectuals who wanted to network with avant-garde artists from all over the world and create a multinational art platform that crossed borders in every respect.

After the dark, cruel war years, the Art Club was to be, according to Jarema at its foundation, “a common, lucid home for those whose only home is freedom in thought, words, images, hopes, and senses.” Two pillars were to support the vanguardist reunion to hurl an artistic ‘never again’ against National Socialism, fascism and right-wing populism: On the one hand, the commitment to the universal language of abstraction, and on the other, the power of international co-operations with like-minded people. It was no coincidence that they settled in Via Margutta, where Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Anna Magnani, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Roeder, and, at times, Pablo Picasso lived at the time.

Thanks to Jarema and Prampolini’s drive, the idea of global networking quickly took off. After only a few years, the Art Club had branches in over 30 countries, the most active of which were in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Israel, Japan, Egypt, and Turkey.

The association organized over 200 exhibitions in the 1940s and 1950s and brought out more than 150 publications. On display were works by nearly 60 artists who were primarily abstract, constructivist, amorphous, non-objective painters and sculptors, most notably Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay, Willi Baumeister, Max Bill, Giorgio de Chirico, Roberto Maguelli, Constantin Brâncuși, and Lucio Fontana, but also Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. Along the way, Jarema curated the “Polish Pavilion at the 24th Venice Biennale” in 1948 and the “Congress of Visual Arts” in Palermo in 1953.

By his own admission, Jarema’s greatest admiration during this period was directed toward an artistic approach rooted in the Dadaist principle of chance and a desire to develop a new object language based on everyday forms. In his own paintings at the time, he employed a formal language that was naturalistic in character while striving for abstraction. In several group exhibitions of the Art Club, he presented his works alongside those of like-minded artists, each exploring in their own way the notion of “the authenticity of intentional coincidence.”

While others sought to distill forms to their purest external contours in an effort to preserve an essential core, Jarema chose a markedly different path: although he too translated natural, organic forms into the abstract, he preserved their vitality and authenticity by revealing their inner essence through an intuitive, gestural style of painting.

In the early 1960s, Jarema moved with his wife Maria to Nice, where they ran with great success a weaving mill together and produced carpets with abstract patterns. 1070 he relocated again, this time to Munich, where he died in 1974.

Jarema can undoubtedly be described as a cosmopolitan and visionary who has been unjustly forgotten and deserves to be rediscovered, especially today, in times of resurgent right-wing populism and nationalism. His paintings - often intimate in scale, but of great determination and enormous intensity - reflect his lifelong commitment to freedom, a joy of experimentation and tolerance.