TEXT ABOUT THE AUTHOR BY Marie Štindlová / A bare-headed girl is hurtling through scenes, passing friends, runs through rose bushes with a multitude of thorns into castles full of sharp edges, dim nooks and creatures with weird physiognomy wearing heels. There’s a banana peel lying on the ground, it’s either a joke or a serious trap. LEGO figures negotiate global matters in the dark while a warrioress does a dramatic gesture in the rain. The girl runs through illuminated by the moon’s crescent. She doesn’t know, at all, where she’s headed. But feels that she needs it.
With her work, Dominika Dobiášová belongs to the ranks of artists who resort to fairytale themes and general picturesqueness turning to the past – be it childhood or the Middle Ages. Rather than escaping towards numbing nostalgia and the ‘good ol’ days’, it’s about handling a generally revealing medium with a potent emotional charge. The emphasis on intuition and emotionality is, in this case, political in itself. And even the individual works have encoded in their core the political stances of their creators. In the paintings of Dominika Dobiášová, we encounter characters reminding us of illustrations from children’s books and comics. These permeate into the adult world in which they deform and become calming.
They inhabit the atmospheric environment of Dominika’s paintings full of edges and shadows. The main guide is always the character of a girl who, sometimes with naiveté, sometimes with humour, leads us through a thick mixture of symbols and attributes via which the author tries to communicate what she’s dealing with, on both political and personal level, at the moment.
She captured the world through the eyes of a girl who senses pressure of the need to have everything sorted out and possess all the answers. She reads articles and books, listens to interviews, has perhaps a hundred tabs open in her browser. She wants to be in the picture. Nothing can pass unnoticed. Instead, she gets entangled in a web of requirements woven by herself and society’s expectations. Only she herself then stays a point of orientation and her own battle with overburdening also becomes a theme. The multitude of narratives and symbols plays big in each painting. The political and personal dramas become so excessively abundant the canvases start to fall apart. Dominika collects them and sews them back together. But what they won’t become is a neat rectangle – the proper painting.
BIO / Currently, Dominika Dobiášová studies painting at the Painting I Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Brno’s University of Technology, she did her bachelor’s at the University of Ostrava, at the Drawing Studio. Besides painting, she takes interest in video and performance art and further collaborates on the Bublina e-zine. Her works could be seen at the Salon Czechoslovaque exhibition in NTK, and in the Ostrava’s galleries of PLATO, Saigon and Nibiru.
CREDITS
Artworks / Dominika Dobiášová @dominikadobias_
Text / Marie Štindlová for SWARM MAG @marie_stindlova
Translation / Františka Blažková @st.feral
