Key in the Castle – DreamWear

Key in the Castle

Urszula Pieregończuk

DreamWear

27.10–6.12.2026

The garment featured in Urszula Pieregończuk’s 2024 work DreamWear is almost entirely covered with characters from animated films. Most of them come from productions of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s - the films and cartoons on which the artist’s generation grew up. Pieregończuk explores how the stories we encounter in childhood create a shared world of imagination and shape how we perceive reality.

The front of the garment features characters associated with positive qualities, including Ariel, Bambi, and Snow White. On the back, the artist has placed darker figures, such as Cruella de Vil, Hades, and Captain Hook. This juxtaposition reflects the complexity of our inner world - what we readily reveal and what remains hidden. After all, the characters we encounter in childhood help shape our understanding of good and evil, friendship, courage, success, and failure.

What connects this contemporary work with the 17th-century Portrait of Maksymilian Franciszek Ossoliński with His Sons? In the earlier painting, the boys resemble scaled-down versions of adult men. They wear similar clothing, signaling their place within the world of the nobility. Above all, the painting presents them as their father’s sons and future representatives of the family line. It depicts a world in which ancestry, continuity, and one’s place in society matter more than individual character.

Brought together as part of Key in the Castle, a series of contemporary art interventions, the two works explore childhood as a time of learning about the world. In the earlier portrait, the sons inherit a particular place within their family and society. In DreamWear, the child is given a collection of stories, characters, and emotions through which to imagine the world and their own place within it.

In both works, clothing takes on particular significance - a second skin shaped by culture. The kontusz speaks of belonging to a specific group and tradition, while the characters covering DreamWear evoke images and emotions remembered from childhood. In the first case, these stories are passed down by those closest to us; in the second, they are transmitted by mass culture. Both works invite us to consider how profoundly the narratives and images around us shape us as we grow up. Perhaps the most important question, however, is this: Who today - and through what content - shapes the personalities and values of future adults in the digital world?

Urszula Pieregończuk (b. 1984) is a visual artist, sculptor, and director of video works. She graduated from the Faculty of Arts at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. In 2025, she defended with distinction her doctoral dissertation, Contemporary Man in the Age of Post-Truth.

Since 2021, she has been creating silicone humanoid objects covered with tattoos. Their surfaces bring together images drawn from popular culture, historical photographs, depictions of politicians, advertisements, and product and corporate logos. The resulting collages explore how images created and imposed by others shape individual identity.

She is a recipient of the Samsung Art Master award and an award at the In Out Festival in Gdańsk. Her works have been presented, among other venues, at the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the LAZNIA Center for Contemporary Art in Gdańsk, and the Pilecki Institute in New York. They are also held in the collection of the Center of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko. She lives and works in Lublin.

Curator: Monika Przypkowska

Organizing commissioner: Paweł Martosz

Exhibition department: Robert Gruszka, Piotr Kubiak, Magdalena Jaroć, Kamil Nowiński, Krzysztof Nowiński, Franciszek Wolf, Dariusz Zgiet

Lighting: Dominik Bojar, Janusz Duczman, Robert Jasiński

Promotion and communication department: Anna Buczyńska, Mateusz Kaczyński, Bartosz Kolczykiewicz, Mikołaj Krupa, Weronika Kuryło, Szymon Majcherowicz, Dorota Parzyszek, Dorota Piskorska, Aleksandra Sajdak, Monika Siadak-Wereda, Paulina Szwed-Piestrzeniewicz, Anna Żak

Proofreading: Urszula Drabińska

Translator: Bartek Kurtycz

Conservation department: Tomasz Buźniak, Piotr Halski

Accessibility Coordinator: Urszula Kubiszyn