Wry Sky

11. 9. 6 pm opening !Thursday / Čtvrtek!
12.–14. 9. 1–6 pm
15.–19. 9. by appointment – peldovab@gmail.com
In cooperation with hunt kastner
Text: Livia Klein

Wry Sky by Dominika Dobiášová (*1996) at Berlinskej Model addresses a desire both ancient and immediate: the impulse to flee into an imagined elsewhere. Set against the backdrop of ongoing political crises and planetary collapse, the works within the exhibition reflect a longing for escape and a nostalgia for redemption, even as the “burning planet” hangs above us like a Damoclean sword. The biblical Garden of Eden, once envisioned as a place of innocence and harmony, resurfaces here as a paradoxical projection: a utopia invoked precisely when its promise seems most unattainable.
In Christian iconography, the sky is traditionally represented as pure and ordered: golden mosaics symbolize timeless eternity, while Baroque ceiling frescoes by Andrea Pozzo or Giovanni Battista Gaulli open triumphant vertical ascents. Suggesting that “a paradise” is not intact, the title Wry Sky marks a rupture in the image of the heavens. In contrast to Pozzo or Gaulli, Dobiášová’s works recall the fractured cosmologies of Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel the Elder, where the paradise already shows fissures, threaded through with absurdity and dread. This sensibility is reinforced by an aesthetic that subtly echoes Art Nouveau, but also the twisted exuberance of the Baroque and the disharmony of the Gothic. The sky thus becomes a distorted mirage, a screen upon which the desire for escape is overlaid, even as the cracks in its surface betray catastrophe. In the present, this “wry” sky becomes literal: marked by smog, flight paths, satellites, and the specter of climate disaster, it no longer signifies transcendence but a damaged biosphere. Paradise is no longer a metaphysical elsewhere, but a lost ecosystem.

Within this horizon, the male figure forms the point of departure. Not rendered as the heroic body celebrated in art history, but as fragile, fatigued, and self-absorbed. This figure embodies a perspective that for centuries defined utopia, yet simultaneously corroded it through violence, domination, and exploitation. In Dobiášová’s works, the male body no longer holds authority but instead embodies exhaustion and disillusionment. In the interplay of weariness, withdrawal, and self-preservation, the male figure ceases to embody power and instead manifests a vulnerability that renders the vision of paradise unstable.

Among the works in the exhibition, the large-scale painting World Belongs to Us (2025) stands out as a possible allusion to the very paradise reflected upon throughout Wry Sky. At first glance, the composition emanates a sense of positivity, recalling Constant Montald’s romanticized landscapes. Yet this perception shifts upon closer inspection. Multiple figures appear within the image, their gestures charged with ambivalence. On the left, a man and a woman lie in each other’s arms, a direct reference to Picasso’s The Embrace (1903). While their posture seems intimate, it remains uncertain: who provides the shoulder, and who leans upon it? Does the man rest upon the woman, or is it the reverse? The figures appear caught between biblical overtones of paradise and the weight of contemporary despair, as if “heaven” demands happiness yet denies it.

Neighbours (2025) unfolds in muted lilac and rose tones, suffused with a sense of unease. The scene hovers between intimacy and violence, with a couple fleeing into the distance–their movement recalling Bosch’s vision of Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise in his Last Judgment triptych (1485–1505)–while another man raises a whip towards them. Is he enforcing their exile, driving them forward, or simply witnessing their departure? In the foreground, we see a family, a mother bending towards their child, her care both tender and desperate. She turns away from the surrounding violence, absorbed in her own well-being and the act of protection, yet this withdrawal also suggests an ambivalent acceptance of the futility of resistance. The man stands with his back to us, watching the scene as if caught between self-reflection and complicity, examining his conscience about what is unfolding, or silently observing what he himself has caused. The tyrant, too, remains ambiguous: an agent of violence, but perhaps himself acting under orders, entangled in the very mechanism of expulsion he enacts.

Furthermore, the smaller paintings, For a While, Smell the Sky (2025) and Love Your Kidnapper (2025) extend this oscillation between fragility and burden into more intimate registers. A figure pauses to inhale the scent of roses as a fleeting attempt at forgetting in the first work. Yet the serenity is unsettled by the presence of a shadowy figure in the background, a pursuer or construct of the mind. Gendered ambiguity permeates the figure: fragility, queerness, and stereotypes intertwine, opening a space where identity cannot be fixed but remains unresolved. Love Your Kidnapper, by contrast, stages an inversion of traditional dynamics: two women attempt to rescue a man, recalling the figure of Athena from the Ludovisi Throne in Rome while subverting the notion of the male savior. This constellation unsettles familiar roles, positioning the female figures as caretakers, while the man appears delicate, dependent, and in need of help. Is care itself a form of captivity? Does the act of saving risk reproducing the very hierarchies it seeks to undo? Within the current political atmosphere, where men continue to occupy the decisive roles, the painting refracts the question of what it means to be a caretaker, whether in private or collective life. Ultimately, Love Your Kidnapper stages a paradox: everyone in the scene needs saving, yet the wish for redemption remains unfulfilled, suspended between dissonance, tenderness, and despair.

The exhibition is complemented by two sculptures that echo the contradiction of the paintings. Worried Woman (2021), a vase-like figure reminiscent of a stern maternal presence, holds drying flowers, while a second work from 2023–originally conceived as a “tree of good and evil”–appears here in the guise of a fountain. Both are placed on mirrored glass, suggesting puddles or overflowing vessels of water, at once mirror and surface, where viewers may glimpse their own image or an inverted world.

With Wry Sky, Dominika Dobiášová underscores that individual fragility and collective catastrophe cannot be disentangled. The longing for redemption, surfacing in intimate gestures as well as in mythological images, remains inseparably bound to a world marked by political domination and ecological devastation. Here, the desire for heaven or paradise is revealed not as an outside escape, but as a projection unfolding within the crises of our time. Utopia remains tethered to the very structures of power it seeks to overcome, mirroring the destruction it simultaneously promises to heal.

Text by Livia Klein