Ensueños de Flora

Curator: Catalina Bagnato Irigoyen

October 24 – December 9, 2026

Opening at Cassia House: Saturday, October 24, 7:00 p.m.

Cassia House presents Ensueños de Flora, a group exhibition exploring representations of the garden, nature and metamorphosis through the work of five contemporary artists.

The exhibition features works by Katerina Atamañuk, Merlina Famularo, Camila Oets, Zia Margaret and Sofía Bengolea.

In 1630 Nicolas Poussin painted “The Empire of Flora”, in which the Roman goddess of flowers, gardens and spring smiles, surrounded by all those tragic beings who will eventually become flowers by divine decree, as the final crowning moment of their intense stories of love and heartbreak. There is something unsettlingly curious about her satisfied smile as she dances among the — mostly painful — metamorphoses of others. Is this the empire of the goddess of spring as imagined by a seventeenth-century painter?

Throughout history, the garden has been represented as a delightful, idyllic space. A place where the sacred and the profane intertwine in memorable conversations with angels or sensual encounters with visitors. From the hortus conclusus, with its crenellated walls protecting the virginity of its inhabitants, to the intimacy of Susanna’s garden, interrupted by the unwelcome elders. Many representations of gardens carry moral prescriptions for the women who look at them: saints, immaculate and orderly natures, various feats of virtue, and more. In reality, however, many are simply a convenient excuse for any painter or viewer wishing to indulge in voyeurism.

The invited artists imagine landscapes, beings and objects that flirt with nature in order to expand it beyond the limits of the possible. Improbable creatures, luminescent flowers, irregular matter emerging from the bones and entrails of their characters, or from the cosmos itself. Their works seem hungry: they propose a garden where poetry extends its roots and brings new possibilities together, where — even in decomposition — we can encounter beauty. This is no longer a space conceived to confine, observe and contain us, but a new, unbridled, almost monstrous nature that grows beyond the edges of every painting and every preconception.

New names will be needed to explore the gallery’s flora and fauna, new eyes and new ways of relating to these forms of creation. And who knows? Perhaps entering a garden like this one implies, as in Poussin’s painting, an inexorable metamorphosis.

- Catalina Bagnato Irigoyen