iDOX Centre for Contemporary Artהולשוביצה
Paintings interpreting Goethe's Faust through Jungian archetypes of desire for knowledge, love, power and fame.
Among the paintings lie Radka Bodzewicz's working notebooks and her own copy of Goethe's Faust, underlined and annotated in detail. It's more heavily marked up than any book on your maturita list ever was.
You climb it floor by floor, one character per floor, each read as a Jungian force: Mephistopheles the Shadow, Gretchen the Anima, Faust the Seeker. The curator, Michaela Šilpochová, says the three also make up one psyche, your own. The 20 large canvases and five objects, all from 2025 and 2026, don't illustrate the plot.
Bodzewicz usually works with VR, holograms and 3D printing. Here she pushed nearly all of it aside for paint, and Respekt made it exhibition of the week under the headline "Without a phone in hand, and with more intensity". A 360 CZK ticket covers every DOX show, Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00 to 19:00, until 8 November. On 15 October at 17:30 the artist and curator lead a tour (250 CZK), followed by the free catalogue launch at 19:00.
The artist's annotated Faust
Look for Bodzewicz's own copy of Goethe's Faust, densely underlined and annotated, shown with the notebooks she kept while making the paintings.
Three floors, three characters
Each floor of the exhibition space belongs to one figure: Mephistopheles as the Shadow, Gretchen as the Anima, and Faust as the Seeker.
You want her VR and holograms: this time she set the technology aside for oil paint.
DOX runs a FAUST storytelling programme for secondary-school groups. Children 7 to 15 pay 150 CZK, under-7s are free, and a family ticket is 720 CZK.