Patrik Proško

The anamorphic portrait of writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924) draws on the motif of transformation, linking Kafka’s literary world with the principle of anamorphosis itself. It is not an illustration of Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, but an exploration of the transformation of meaning, in which seemingly unrelated things come together to form a new whole. The installation is conceived as a writer’s desk. A typewriter positioned inside the head stands in for the brain, while the surrounding composition consists of writing implements, pages from Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, an old scale, a magnifying glass, candles and other objects that might have belonged on a writer’s desk. Insects appear among the pages, referring to Řehoř Samsa, the protagonist of The Metamorphosis, who one day is transformed into an insect. The small scale of the installation also leaves very little spatial tolerance within the anamorphic composition. Individual details are formed from very small objects whose positions must be determined with millimetre precision, as even a slight shift can disrupt the legibility of the resulting portrait.