Lot 226

Jaroslav Róna (1957) STATUE OF FRANZ KAFKA

It is a smaller version of the famous almost four-metre high statue of the Franz Kafka Monument, which stands in Prague on the border of the Old Town and Josefov on the site of the now defunct house where Franz Kafka lived. The statue's design was inspired by Kafka's earliest surviving text, the short story Description of a Struggle. It is a sculpture made up of two bodies, one of which is emptied, representing the full form purely through the medium of a man's suit, whose arms do not come out of the sleeves (a theme of uniform that is key to Central European literary modernism); on her shoulders sits a smaller figure with a certain lightness, which in turn is complete and is meant to represent Kafka himself. From the beginning, Róna is a painter and sculptor in one person. Both media are thematically linked to the same world, which forms a relationship to the mysterious, ironic and grotesque, often drawing on the art of archaic peoples or futurism. The offered tintype variant was created in a small number of casts made by the artist.