The Head of Franz Kafka: Prague's Shape-Shifting Portrait
Why is it significant?
In the little square behind the Národní třída metro station stands a silver head more than ten metres tall, built from forty-two horizontal slices of polished steel. Wait a moment... the slices start to turn, each on its own, until the face breaks apart into a shining spiral of plates.
Key Facts
| Place | The Head of Franz Kafka: Prague's Shape-Shifting Portrait |
|---|---|
| Address | Spálená 2121/22, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08170, 14.42080 |
| Part of Walk | Kafka's Prague: A Literary Walk Through the Writers' City |
| Generated | Generated |
In the little square behind the Národní třída metro station stands a silver head more than ten metres tall, built from forty-two horizontal slices of polished steel. Wait a moment... the slices start to turn, each on its own, until the face breaks apart into a shining spiral of plates. Then slowly they find each other again, and Kafka is looking at you once more.
This is David Černý's Head of Franz Kafka, unveiled in 2014. Černý is Prague's great provocateur, the artist who in 1991 painted a Soviet tank memorial pink and later sent giant faceless babies crawling up the Žižkov television tower. Here the joke is gentler, and sadder. Kafka wrote about a man who wakes up transformed into a monstrous insect, about an identity that can crack without warning. A head that keeps falling apart and reassembling itself is about as faithful a portrait as metal can offer.
It is a machine as much as a sculpture: every layer has its own motor, and a computer choreographs the whole dance. The mirror-polished surface reflects the passers-by, the trams, the shop windows... so Kafka's face is always partly made of you.
There is an irony here that Kafka would have recognised. In his lifetime he published only a few slim books and was barely known outside a small circle. He asked Max Brod to burn everything else. Brod refused, and in March 1939, on the night before German troops entered Prague, he escaped on one of the last trains out, with Kafka's manuscripts in his suitcase. That is how the world got The Trial and The Castle.
For long stretches of the communist era Kafka's books were hard to find in his own city. Now the writer who wanted to vanish revolves ten metres tall in a shopping passage. Walk east along Charvátova and up Vodičkova to Jungmannovo náměstí, a small square watched over by a seated bronze scholar.