Key in the Castle - DreamWear, Royal Castle in Warsaw

“DreamWear” by Urszula Pieregończuk is the next exhibition in the “Key in the Castle” (Klucz w Zamku) series, in which the Royal Castle in Warsaw sets a selected work of contemporary art beside its own collection. The museum pairs a garment covered with characters from animated films with a 17th-century portrait of Maksymilian Franciszek Ossoliński with his sons. The exhibition will run 27 October 2026 - 6 December 2026; the curator is Monika Przypkowska.

The Royal Castle in Warsaw on the exhibition:

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?

What to expect

The museum’s description speaks of two works: “DreamWear”, Pieregończuk’s 2024 piece, and the 17th-century portrait of Ossoliński with his sons from the Castle’s collection.

The garment has two sides, and both are part of the work. On the front the artist has placed characters associated with positive qualities, among them Ariel, Bambi and Snow White; on the back, dark figures: Cruella de Vil, Hades and Captain Hook. So it is worth looking at the garment from both sides.

The portrait with which the museum pairs the garment was painted by an unknown artist in 1670-1680; the canvas measures 212 by 110 cm. According to the entry in the Castle’s digital collection, it most probably shows Maksymilian Franciszek Ossoliński with his three sons: Michał, Franciszek Maksymilian and Jan Stanisław. It was previously thought to depict Maksymilian’s father, Zbigniew Ossoliński. It is one of thirteen portraits that survive from the Ossoliński family gallery in the palace at Sterdyń, acquired by the Castle in 2008.

The museum links the two works through the themes of childhood and dress. In the portrait the boys look like scaled-down adults, in clothes that mark them as members of the nobility, and it is their family that passes stories on to them; in “DreamWear” it is mass culture that gives the child a stock of stories and characters. The question the museum poses at the end is about the present day: who, and through what content, shapes the personality and values of future adults in the digital world.

Context

Urszula Pieregończuk (born 1984) is a visual artist, sculptor and director of video works. She graduated from the Faculty of Arts of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, and in 2025 she defended, with distinction, her doctoral thesis “Człowiek współczesny w czasach postprawdy” (Contemporary Man in the Age of Post-Truth). She lives and works in Lublin.

Since 2021 she has been making silicone humanoid objects covered with tattoos, on which she combines images from pop culture, historical photographs, images of politicians, advertisements and logos. In the exhibition “Story Time” at Galeria Biała of the Centrum Kultury w Lublinie (Centre for Culture in Lublin) in 2025 she showed sculptures made from casts of human skin, tattooed with, among other things, newspaper headlines, logos and characters from fairy tales and cartoons. The museum does not say outright whether “DreamWear” belongs to this series of objects.

Her work has been shown at, among other venues, the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdańsk and the Pilecki Institute in New York; it is also held in the collection of the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko. The Castle presents her as a winner of Samsung Art Master and of the In Out Festival in Gdańsk.

According to the museum, “Key in the Castle” consists of live meetings with Polish artists in the Castle’s exhibition spaces, during which a selected contemporary work, set beside the collection, enters into a dialogue with it. The series has run without a break since 2022 and is the original project of the art historian Monika Przypkowska, who leads the meetings.

Earlier editions of the series were installed in the Castle’s interiors: Anna Baumgart’s objects in the King’s Bedroom and the Crown Horse Guards Hall, Agata Zbylut’s “Bezoary” (Bezoars) in the Yellow Room, and Karolina Jarzębak’s “Memesis” in the New Chamber of Deputies.

Tickets and time

• What the museum has not yet announced: the room in which the exhibition will be shown; the admission terms (whether a route ticket is needed, and whether free Wednesdays and Free November cover the exhibition); the material and dimensions of the garment; whether the labels will be in English.
• Where: in the Royal Castle at plac Zamkowy 4 (Castle Square). Directions are on the museum profile.
• Ticket: in the online booking system, under “Wystawy czasowe” (Temporary exhibitions), there is no separate ticket for “DreamWear”; the only items there are tickets and lectures connected with the exhibition “The Secret Chambers of the People’s Authorities” (as of 19 October 2026). Agata Zbylut’s “Bezoary” (Bezoars), the edition of the series in November and December 2024, stood in the Yellow Room on the Royal Route, so by our editorial estimate you will most likely need a route ticket for “DreamWear”; the museum does not confirm this. Prices of the routes are on the museum profile.
• When: the Castle’s opening hours: Mon: closed, Tue-Sun: 10:00-17:00. The Castle is closed on 1 November 2026 (All Saints' Day).
• Wednesdays and November: free admission on Wednesdays, but according to the museum only for the special route in the Castle (the Royal Apartments from the Oval Gallery to the Crown Horse Guards Hall, plus the Lanckoroński Gallery) and the Copper-Roof Palace (Pałac pod Blachą). Free November: in November 2026 the Castle opens a special route free of charge (the state rooms of the King's and the Great Apartments, the Matejko Rooms, the Senate Chamber), and on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays also the Prince Józef Poniatowski Apartment in the Copper-Roof Palace. Free passes are available at the ticket office and online.
• Best time to go: Saturday 31 October, the day of the meeting with the artist (see Events).
• How long: according to the museum’s description the exhibition consists of two works, so by our editorial estimate it will take from a few minutes to a quarter of an hour or so on its own. The length of the visit will depend on the route: according to the museum, the Royal Route takes about 60 minutes, the Museum Route about 90 and the Castle Route, which combines the two, about 150.
• Who it is for: visitors who are going on a Castle route anyway and want to see how a contemporary work enters into a dialogue with an old portrait. Also for parents: the exhibition is about childhood and asks who, in today’s digital world, shapes the values of future adults. The way the characters are split across the garment - positive heroes on the front, dark ones on the back - gives a ready starting point for a conversation with a child about what cartoons teach.
• Who can skip it: anyone looking for a large exhibition who would come for it alone. It is two works. The Castle’s two other temporary exhibitions, open throughout the run of “DreamWear”, offer more (see below).

Events

• 31 October 2026 (Saturday), 15:00 - a meeting with the artist Urszula Pieregończuk, free entry with the password “Klucz w Zamku”. The series’ meetings are led by Monika Przypkowska: zamek-krolewski.pl.

See also

• Gisleni. A Roman Architect in Poland - nearly thirty large-format drawings by the architect of the Vasa court, brought from the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. For those whom the Ossoliński portrait leaves curious about the 17th century.
• The Secret Chambers of the People’s Authorities - an exhibition about the luxury apartments in the Castle intended for foreign guests of the authorities of communist Poland; the project was never carried out. In the “Wystawy czasowe” (Temporary exhibitions) category of the Castle’s online ticket office, it is the only exhibition with separate tickets.
• Chic and Conventions. Costumes from the Film “The Doll” - 32 costumes from the latest screen adaptation of “Lalka” (The Doll) at the Royal Łazienki Museum. The museum writes that there the clothes let you read the characters’ social belonging, wealth and aspirations; the pairing of “DreamWear” with the Ossoliński portrait also asks about dress as a sign of belonging.

Museum profile: The Royal Castle in Warsaw.