Roses for Mother began in 2018 as intimate, improvised postcards: flowers that Dominik Tarabański arranged and photographed while travelling, then sent home to his mother as a way of bringing her the world she had taught him to believe in. He could not send the flowers themselves, so a photo went in their place. The series is on view at Bergdorf Goodman, as part of Gabriella Khalil's design residency, until the end of August 2026.
Tarabański was born in 1982 in Radymno, Poland, a small town near the Ukrainian border, and studied photography in Łódź and Warsaw. After four years moving between Polish cities, he left for New York in 2012. He has what he calls a primal side: the pull to go farthest and fastest, to do a little more than is asked. Heading to New York, he says, was like going to the moon; a single three-week visit decided it for him. Fashion photography paid the bills and took him between New York, Paris and London. The still lifes he made by hand, away from the crowded sets.
Tarabański says he is pursuing ‘this intersection of synthetic and organic', which sits ‘at the foundation of everything I do'. He contorts living matter into arrangements as deliberately impossible as a Dutch flower painting, then photographs them at the fleeting point of giving way. The finished prints are large, over 2m tall, and hold the wall like sculpture. From a rubber band and a dried stem, he makes what he calls a kind of magic: ‘Nothing becomes something.' He could have worked in concrete, he says; the delicacy was deliberate, a counterweight to a world he finds increasingly harsh.
Asked about what he retains of his birthplace, Tarabański is wary of the question and the clichés it invites, but what he will own is a disposition. There is the composure he trains for each morning through a hard physical routine, so that the day's work comes to him more easily; the optimism and the sensitivity he traces to his mother; and an economy he calls ‘very Polish', the instinct of a culture ‘excellent at being efficient'. It shows (or doesn't) as a privately held ethic, the discipline of working well when nobody looks at you, and in the determination to keep a contemporary vernacular of his native Polish, unwilling to let distance wear it down. Since moving to New York, Tarabański has become a compulsive hiker, seeking out a trail wherever he travels. This, and the wildness of the elements in his work, are his reply to a city of pressure and hard surface. The same balance runs through the rest of his life, in the way Poland and New York each answer to the word ‘home'.
His latest series, Between Stems, makes pressure its subject: knotweed, orchid and lily pinned and taped under tension, a measure of how much the world can load onto a thing before it gives. The work was shown this year with LA gallery Marta at FOG Design+Art in San Francisco, alongside that of Minjae Kim. A further solo exhibition in New York, also with Marta, is planned for autumn 2026. It will draw on Little Roses, a freer parallel series of pieces that run from the hand-sized to ones taller than Tarabański is.
This article appears in the August 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today
