Radka Bodzewicz: FAUST

Radka Bodzewicz’s work has long been rooted in literary inspirations—her reading of poetry, prose, and scholarly and philosophical texts. She updates the motifs and themes she finds in literature—which she perceives as timeless—through her distinctive visual language into extensive, conceptually and expressively cohesive series of images, in which she often combines classical artistic techniques with forays into new technologies.

In recent years, the artist has interpreted canonical works of world literature in this manner—Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, the epic poem Paradise Lost by the English poet John Milton, and the essay The Myth of the Eternal Return by the American religious scholar Mircea Eliade. For the exhibition at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art, she decided to continue her artistic reflection with another iconic literary work—Goethe’s Faust.

Radka Bodzewicz understands the story of Doctor Faust as an expression of Jung’s principle of archetypes of human desire, which stem from deeply embedded patterns of experience and are—literarily (and simplistically) speaking—the motivation, driving force, and architect of human destinies. In the universal conflict between good and evil, Faust, as portrayed by Radka Bodzewicz, thus embodies our own stories: of the endless desire for knowledge, love, power, and fame, or for transcending the limits of the possible, as well as of the fatefulness and irreversibility of our own decisions, our own pacts with the devil.

**RADKA BODZEWICZ** (* 1991) is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Graphic Arts II studio / Vladimír Kokolia’s class and Sculpture II / Jindřich Zeithamml’s class, 2017). During her studies, she participated in an internship at Robert Gordon University – Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen (2016), and in 2018 she was a finalist for the Leinemann-Stiftung für Bildung und Kunst Award. Her work is significantly influenced by her interest in literary and philosophical texts, whose themes she develops into monumental painting series and expands upon classical artistic techniques through new technologies (virtual reality, holographic imagery, or 3D printing). Her work has been presented in a number of solo exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad.