Franz Kafka - Rotating Head by David Cerny

An eleven-metre head of Franz Kafka made of dozens of stainless steel layers that turn independently, break the face apart and slowly put it back together.

The sculptor David Černý created it in 2014 for the Quadrio office and shopping complex above Národní třída metro station. Its forty-two motorised layers rotate in programmed sequences, so the portrait constantly dissolves into abstract shapes and reassembles — a fitting image for a writer whose characters struggled with shifting, fragmented identities. The mirrored surface also reflects the passers-by and the surrounding buildings.

Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, spent almost his whole life in the city and wrote in German. Černý is the city's best-known and most provocative contemporary artist, also behind the babies on the Žižkov Television Tower and the pink-painted Soviet tank of 1991; read more in Prague statues and memory.

The sculpture stands in a small square behind the Quadrio building and is free to see at any time. The movement runs in cycles, so wait a few minutes if the head is still. It is a short walk from Wenceslas Square and the New Town's shopping streets.