DREAMS OF PLANTS

DREAMS OF PLANTS / 29.10.2026 - 28.11.2026

From 30 October, the City Gallery in Wrocław will be transformed into a curious garden, filled with drawings, paintings, sculptures, objects and installations by artists whose creative practice extensively explores the plant world in its least obvious aspects.

The exhibition Dreams of Plants stems from a desire to do justice to the extraordinary universe of flora, which for centuries has consistently been overshadowed, in terms of significance, by the favoured realms of human and animal existence. For this reason — to bring the mysterious and still only partially understood botanical world into focus in all its distinctiveness, the exhibition seeks to highlight the similarities that connect these two realms, which turn out to be not so very different after all. It finds analogies with botanical structures and the human neural and circulatory systems, mathematical diagrams, integrated circuits and road networks. It traces the presence of plants not only across a wide range of fields of human scholarship and culture, but also in biological processes and geological phenomena.

The works of the invited artists reveal a fascination with plant matter, a remarkable material rich in both meaning and form. It is through this matter that the artists reflect on pressing social questions and explore the complex relationship between humankind and nature, reach out to events from the distant past or spin futuristic visions. In doing so, they reveal the boundless potential for meaning that flora holds.

The exhibition’s curatorial approach allows chronology and temporal boundaries to dissolve. It draws on the idea of the Kunstkammer, particularly popular in the early modern period. As precursors of the modern museum, these cabinets of curiosities allowed monarchs, princes and aristocrats to display the breadth of their aesthetic and scholarly interests. Following their example, the exhibition brings together a broad spectrum of objects from diverse fields of study, without adhering to any consistent principle of collecting. Alongside nineteenth-century botanical engravings, it features geological and mineralogical specimens from museum collections

Łukasz Huculak, co-curator and exhibiting artist, describes the show in these words: The exhibition attempts a syncretic account of how plants are present in culture and science — from botanical fossils, through allegory, symbol and plant physiology, to interspecies rivalry and floral utopias — in the spirit of the cabinet of curiosities, where scholarly truth and artistic fiction together create potential plant worlds.

The exhibition runs until 28 November 2026.

Artists: Justyna Baśnik, Łukasz Huculak, Konrad Juściński, Mikołaj Kowalski, Małgorzata Pawlak, Monika Polak, Wojciech Ireneusz Sobczyk

Curators: Katarzyna Zahorska, Łukasz Huculak