In the studio with botanical designer-artist Marcin Rusak

November 21, 2025

When designer and artist Marcin Rusak was young, his grandfather, a botanist, taught him about the wonders of the natural world – and its inevitable cycles of decline. His flower business closed before Rusak was born, and the designer’s earliest memories are filled with abandoned, overgrown greenhouses.

 

This fascination with nature and decay stayed with him; while studying at the Royal College of Art, he became preoccupied with the amount of waste at London’s flower markets, collecting it for his work. This led to some of Rusak’s earliest conceptual pieces, including a recreation of a 16th-century wooden cabinet made entirely from organic materials.

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      Marcin Rusak

      Marcin Rusak was born in 1987 in Warsaw, Poland. He holds undergraduate degrees in humanities from the University of Warsaw and in art from the Eindhoven Design Academy in the Netherlands, as well as an MA in Design Products from London’s Royal College of Arts. He currently works out of London and Warsaw. With an experimental practice that merges contemporary art and design, Rusak draws inspiration from theoretical research and philosophical inquiry as well as from explorations of material processes in the studio. Influenced by his family lineage as a third generation descendant of flower growers after his father and grandfather, he has developed signature techniques using plant flora as a striking decorative element within his work, preserving flowers and leaves in resin which are fused seamlessly into his thoughtful modern pieces. Each piece is unique, conserving the ephemeral shades and textures of petals and leaves, which float suspended in beautiful contrast with the smooth white, black or clear resin encasing them. Rusak is also adept at creating minimal designs in metal, carving materials to their bare elements to create elegant, rugged forms. In addition to his exquisite design furniture, Rusak produces artworks on silk using colorful flower pigmentation, resulting in simple and delicate pieces marked by bright natural abstract formations. Still in the emerging phase of his career, Rusak is already the recipient of numerous industry awards including the Mazda Design Award, the Architectural Digest Design Award, the Wallpaper Design Award, and the Perrier-Jouet Arts Salon Prize, among others. He was recently selected as a part of #AD100. He has held solo exhibitions at Twenty First Gallery in New York as well as at galleries in London, Miami, and Brussels. His work has also appeared in a number of group exhibitions at prestigious venues in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, including the V&A London, the London Design Festival, Design Miami Basel, Design Days Dubai, and Japan’s Toyama Museum of Art and Design.

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