DOX, a contemporary arts centre in the post-industrial Prague neighbourhood of Holeševice, will blow your mind. It not only offers more world-class art shows than you can shake a stick at, it is also an adventure of architecture and its café is one of the city’s best-kept secrets. Oh, and an airship seems to have landed on it.
Let me take you through DOX, starting with the building. Situated in a mainly modernist pre-war factory complex that was acquired by businessman Leoš Válka in 2002, DOX opened in 2008. Private investment financed the buildings’ transformation by architect Ivan Kroupa, who created a bright white 3D-maze to connect all the galleries and facilities he carved out inside. DOX was acclaimed in architectural circles, but more was to come. Válka and architect Martin Rajniš co-designed the Airship Gulliver, a 42m-long dirigible-shaped structure of wood and steel that has stretched high above the courtyard since 2016, and is accessible to visitors. Two years later, the 700-capacity auditorium, the DOX+ Multifunctional Hall, designed by Petr Hájek, opened, with facades padded like a mattress.
What’s on at DOX now? On the ground floor, the big-ticket show is Up in Flames, a feast of David Lynch’s drawings, lithographs, photography and short experimental film. The trademark darkness, isolation and strangeness of his films also runs deep in his art. A sinister surrealism shapes his work, from his take on vintage pornography in the Distorted Nudes photographic series (1999) to the desolate sci-fi landscape in his short film Industrial Soundscape (2002). The erotic allure in the Nudes (1992) photo series triggered memories of Mulholland Drive, his masterly 2001 LA detective movie. Every one of Lynch’s meticulous small drawings, dark lithographs and stark paintings in black white and red, some abstract, are windows into his unique imagination, and often come with a dash of humour. Immersed in this exhibition, his nightmarish vision becomes a drug.
In DOX’s small tower is London-based Hynek Martinec’ Cyber_lemon. Seeing the word ‘AI’ in the blurb, I approached it with cynicism, but on the top floor, his whole-wall montages immediately grabbed me. To classical drawings he inserts features like a burning Cybertruck and a lemon held by Atlas on his shoulders. Lemons are a recurring theme, from shelves of decaying lemons to items in still-life paintings. His Dream Drawings (2022-25) are quite different from other works – intense, dense surrealistic cartoons crowded up with disturbing faces. But otherwise, the juxtaposition classical arts and refinements with contemporary techno-angst, just as the AI take-over has began, seems to ask — what happened?
Like Lynch, Orhan Parmuk is known in creative territory far from art galleries – he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. The show The Consolation of Objects announces that he’s also a visual artist. His seductive photography of Istanbul by evening shows its street life, but framed in the scale and density of the city. Delicate drawings illustrate what he sees through his window when he sits to write. Objects in curiosity cabinets converse with paintings from German museums, while other cabinets arrange items that document personal memories. Who comes out from me (2024) is a surrealistic montage of people significant to him, emerging from a baby’s mouth. Parmuk’s work is charming, and charged with gentle power.
The small Point of view 3: balance show offers a few recent sculptures and images that explore connections between the technological and organic worlds. Some are striking — Denisa Müllerová’s digital print your blood tastes like liquid metal (2025) is a good example, imagining a balance of technology and organic in our own blood.
Finally, the exhibition that was my personal favourite, by Prague-based Russian artist Viktor Pivovarov. In the 70s, he was a key non-official artist and intellectual, beyond Soviet state control. Metaphysics and Despair is his very recent work in three parts. First, abstract and semi-abstract sketches exploring colours corresponding to spiritual states specified by 1920s Russian avant-garde writer Daniil Kharms. Then Pivovarov’s surprisingly extensive series of paintings Poets and Muses. There are so many, they fill several rooms, yet all were painted in 2024 — and they are extraordinary. Each depicts a surrealistic scene and explores angst and sexuality laced with an enigmatic symbolism and dashes of irony and whimsy, and in a style not unlike classic Surrealism of the 20s/30s. In the last room, daily bulletins (in English) from the Ukraine war are matched with images that echo Soviet Suprematism and Constructivism, are again surrealistic, yet as crisply structured as any commercial graphic design. From start to finish, Pivovarov’s prolific output attracts the eye to illuminate the folly and enigma of human nature. He’s 88 years old now, a giant of art who’s still in his prime.
At some point in the epic journey through DOX, you’ll need refreshment. The café is almost secret because it’s not on the street, and it opens onto a vast terrace overlooking the old cobbled courtyard. Settle on an outdoor sofa with a full view of the Airship Gulliver. Descend to the courtyard, and you’ll find permanent sculptural installations, including one of Kryštof Hošek’s giant skeleton hands from 2019. In übercool contemporary touristic Prague, signs of the dark communist days are hard to find, but here, big posters honour not just writer, dissident and post-Velvet Revolution president Václav Havel, but also Milada Horáková, heroic resistance politician against Nazis, then the Stalinist regime, who was executed by the communists in 1950 after a show trial.
What I saw this August at DOX left me stunned. In the city of Kafka, it’s great to find that angst, dreams, and a surrealist eye are alive, and link different contemporary shows in the current exhibition program. But there are also responses to the today’s technological tsunami frothing with AI. Book a passage to Prague now – if only because the Pivovarov show ends in autumn. Even if you miss it, there’s plenty more to see, not least Lynch. Any day in DOX is an adventure of the mind that’s hard to match.
David Lynch: Up In Flames until 8th February 2026
Hynek Martines: Cyber_lemon until 6th April 2026
Orhan Parmu: The Consolation of Objects until 6th April 2026
Point of view 3: balance until 22nd March 2026
Viktor Pivovarov: Metaphysics and Despair until 10th October 2025
DOX, Poup?tova 1, Prague 7, is open 11AM – 7PM, Tuesday to Sunday
MORE: @doxprague
