Dominik Tarabański’s pictures resemble Dutch flower work

Roses for Mother started in 2018 as intimate, improvised postcards: flowers that Dominik Tarabański organized and photographed whereas travelling, then despatched residence to his mom as a approach of bringing her the world she had taught him to imagine in. He couldn’t ship the flowers themselves, so a photograph went of their place. The sequence is on view at Bergdorf Goodman, as a part of Gabriella Khalil’s design residency, till the tip of August 2026.

Tarabański was born in 1982 in Radymno, Poland, a small city close to the Ukrainian border, and studied pictures in Łódź and Warsaw. After 4 years transferring between Polish cities, he left for New York in 2012. He has what he calls a primal facet: the pull to go farthest and quickest, to perform a little greater than is requested. Heading to New York, he says, was like going to the moon; a single three-week go to determined it for him. Fashion pictures paid the payments and took him between New York, Paris and London. The nonetheless lifes he made by hand, away from the crowded units.

Tarabański says he’s pursuing ‘this intersection of artificial and natural’, which sits ‘on the basis of every part I do’. He contorts dwelling matter into preparations as intentionally not possible as a Dutch flower portray, then pictures them on the fleeting level of giving approach. The completed prints are massive, over 2m tall, and maintain the wall like sculpture. From a rubber band and a dried stem, he makes what he calls a type of magic: ‘Nothing turns into one thing.’ He might have labored in concrete, he says; the delicacy was deliberate, a counterweight to a world he finds more and more harsh.

Asked about what he retains of his birthplace, Tarabański is cautious of the query and the clichés it invitations, however what he’ll personal is a disposition. There is the composure he trains for every morning by way of a tough bodily routine, in order that the day’s work involves him extra simply; the optimism and the sensitivity he traces to his mom; and an economic system he calls ‘very Polish’, the intuition of a tradition ‘wonderful at being environment friendly’. It exhibits (or does not) as a privately held ethic, the self-discipline of working properly when no person appears to be like at you, and within the dedication to maintain a up to date vernacular of his native Polish, unwilling to let distance put on it down. Since transferring to New York, Tarabański has change into a compulsive hiker, in search of out a path wherever he travels. This, and the wildness of the weather in his work, are his reply to a metropolis of strain and onerous floor. The identical steadiness runs by way of the remainder of his life, in the way in which Poland and New York every reply to the phrase ‘residence’.

His newest sequence, Between Stems, makes strain its topic: knotweed, orchid and lily pinned and taped underneath stress, a measure of how a lot the world can load onto a factor earlier than it provides. The work was proven this yr with LA gallery Marta at FOG Design+Art in San Francisco, alongside that of Minjae Kim. An extra solo exhibition in New York, additionally with Marta, is deliberate for autumn 2026. It will draw on Little Roses, a freer parallel sequence of items that run from the hand-sized to ones taller than Tarabański is.