The exhibition has been organised to celebrate the writer's centenary (1921-2006)

Best known for the psychic tension of Solaris and the delirious stellar adventures of Ijon Tichy, Pirx the pilot or builders Trul and Claupacius, the work of the Polish writer Stanisław  Lem constitutes a fictional universe that is complex and coherent as well as entertaining. A compendium of the intellectual challenges of the 20th century, Lem’s humour is satirical: his science fiction functions as an argumentation ad absurdum of the headaches of everyday life, multiplied by the infinite vertigo of the galaxy. And it is the same with his robots: if other authors are the Apollonian version of our rational side (human beings, scrubbed and polished), in Lem they are a faithful portrait of what best defines us: errare humanum est. Creator of apocryphal studies and invented bibliography, extraordinary narrator of postmodern forms and the enlightened modern soul, Stanisław  Lem’s literary work is like Escher’s in contemporary art: proof that correctness of form does not need to correspond to any kind of absolute truth (not even mathematical truth) and that what we say can mislead, acting as a disguise. The limitations of language condemn us to misunderstand each other. Does this mean that communication is impossible between supposedly "intelligent" beings and civilisations? Lem is the Borges of science fiction. He goes from Swift to Kafka, Verne to Carroll and Huxley to Philip K. Dick. And he puts this huge creative freedom at the service of an authentic mental 'big bang' in continuous expansion.