Elegant Futuristic Financial Center ///// Elegante centro finanziario futuristico, Anna Linda Knoll - T.O.E. Art Market

ENG: “Elegant Architectural Shapes and Patterns in Central and Eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia)” Photo Series by Anna Linda Knoll – TITLE: Elegant Futuristic Financial Center, Quadrio Financial District with Head of Franz Kafka Kinetic Sculpture by David Cerny Czech Sculptor, Prague, Czech Republic, UNESCO World Heritage Site – MORE INFORMATION: In the words of photographer Anna Linda Knoll: “I am a professional writer of the art of Czech sculptor David Cerny from Central and Eastern Europe in English, German and Italian. This year and in the following years, several of the artist’s sculptures, installations and art projects will have jubilees, anniversaries and festivals, so more and more of my essays will become available in different languages, the links of which can be found on my official website in the list of my publications. The work “Head of Franz Kafka” shown in my photo is 10 years old this year. Being a kinetic sculpture, I consider it particularly important to write its history and effects so far, to interpret this work of art well and to think about it in the artist’s oeuvre. Here I will mainly tell you about why I like this artwork as a photographer. However, before that, as a literary historian, we need to clarify some basic facts and connections. Before analyzing the sculpture, it is necessary to examine who wants to interpret Franz Kafka writer. We must know for sure about every presentation of Kafka (whether literary or artistic) that whoever deals with Kafka must be a Jewish origin. This is a basic rule in Central and Eastern Europe that is valid forever. This is an important question because if not a person of Jewish origin deals with a writer and artist of Jewish origin, it entails a complex legal case, during which the possibility of anti-Semitism also arises. We must be able to understand that it is not possible to create negative or, on the contrary, exaggerated, positive but not authentic content about Jewish writers and artists from a layman’s point of view (as non-Jewish origin). No content or recommendation can be created by a layman. I, as a Roman Catholic, know that the same is the case with the writers and artists of the Roman Catholic religion. This statute can be extended globally. This fundamental question cannot be ignored. This is important because we need to state, to avoid misunderstandings, that David Cerny is in no way a gypsy, and that is absolutely certain. This is a very important question, as more and more Gypsy art collectors in Central and Eastern Europe buy art objects abroad. They must not be deceived. How would we trick them? The meaning of the artist’s name can be misleading for the less informed Gypsy art collector. The name of the artist is a very popular gypsy nickname in several Central and Eastern European countries. However, in the case of the Czech sculptor David Cerny, it is completely different, his name carries a completely different meaning, and I will explain this in great detail here. So, he is just as legal to erect a sculpture to Kafka as I am to deal with Kafka as a literary historian. By the way, I have friends with the same last name in several countries: Hungary, Poland and Romania, and they are not Gypsies either. In fact, a famous 20th-century Hungarian writer who is one of the greatest environmentalists in Hungarian literature (Istvan Fekete) used the same last name. He gave the Hungarian people a wonderfully beautiful oeuvre. He is the most widely read writer in Hungarian literature as an environmental writer, and I grew up in the town, Kaposvar, where he also lived with his family, so I know his life story well since I was a child. He wasn’t a gypsy either. After this, let us state that this situation with this surname is not unprecedented in the 20th century Central and Eastern European region. Of course, that’s not the only reason why I think that the sculptor’s style suits me, that’s why I like his works of art. I love the Czech Republic very much. My great childhood experience is Czechoslovakia from Czechoslovakian films and from a trip when my parents and I traveled through Czechoslovakia by train from Hungary to Germany in the very early 1990s. While traveling, I looked out the window at the landscape and the cities, and I remember the border guards well. Czechoslovakia made a deep impression on me as a child. All this is perhaps not surprising, since I am a post-Soviet, as I was born in Hungary in 1982. That is why I will surely be able to say something new about the artworks of sculptor David Cerny in a way that was not done before me – because his critics did not do it with an understanding intention. I really like the Czech Republic, Prague in particular. It is a capital of wonderful beauty in the Central and Eastern European region. One of the most beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Site capitals in the world. Prague offers a time travel. By visiting here, you can experience the region’s 1,000-year history. The cultural treasures are stunningly beautiful. Millions of tourists visit David Cerny’s Franz Kafka sculpture in Prague every year. Perhaps that is why the sculptor’s dilettante critics see this artwork as nothing more than a tourist selfie destination in Prague. The city of Prague also included David Cerny’s “Head of Franz Kafka” sculpture in its official marketing. It is not difficult to discover this sculpture in Prague. As a Prague-born superstar sculptor, David Cerny has created many sculptures for Prague, and this is certainly the easiest to find. We exit from the Narodni trida subway station, above which the Quadrio shopping mall and office building has been built since 2014. Let’s explore the installation next to the building. It’s really not hard to find. A 21st century financial district was organized around the Quadrio complex with historically significant buildings in the surroundings. The mood of discovering the Kafka sculpture has changed in many ways since the environment was created. The installation is located in a pedestrian zone, which has been landscaped, so a visit under lush trees provides a pleasant refreshment. This area is expressed in Swabian terms: green corridor clear passage, where people can take part in a city break in an impressive natural environment. The location of the statue is usually advertised with the fact that Franz Kafka lived and worked in this area during his legal career. However, I think there is more to the David Cerny artwork than that. Since the 21st-century style complex is surrounded by historical buildings, mostly in the Art Nouveau style of the early 20th century, the architectural historical period is also projected in front of us in the reflective surface of the gigantic head in which Franz Kafka lived in the 20th century. It is like a spatial and temporal extension of the luxurious shopping streets of the Josefov Jewish Quarter in the city center of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Prague. A momentary illusion that the Second World War did not exist, and that the Jewish population did not die, but that they are still here in the whole city center, as they were then. It would be nice if that were the case. I have to talk about the reflective surface of the sculpture, on the one hand, for myself and for the sake of the sculptor. Ten years ago, in 2014, I photographed the Géode building in the Parc de la Villette in Paris. It’s an old modern building, it had its grand opening in the spring of 1985 on my birthday, but I love it not only for that, but also for its reflective surface. It’s as fashionable as it was in the 80s, and it won’t lose its charm later, just like the Kafka sculpture. My photo of the building became popular all over the world within a few years. The baby in my photo became a 10-year-old French child this summer. The baby is also my child a little through my photo. I hope my photo of the David Cerny’s Kafka artwork in my private collection will be just as famous. This sculpture was created by the sculptor David Cerny especially for me, because I am a literary historian who is a fan of Kafka and I really like to see works of art in reflective surfaces and take pictures of myself with them. This is one of my self-portrait projects in the 2010s. In this case, in the exaggerated dimensions of admiration and love, the reflected surface is the entire surface of the sculpture composition itself. With this, the sculptor is able to integrate into his composition everything that surrounded Kafka in his life, everything that was important to him in his environment in Prague. As the environment of the statue has developed, beautified, greener, more comfortable and more aesthetic in the last 10 years, the statue is beautified by the colors reflected in it. Nowadays, we see a much more colorful sculpture than in the beginning. This is also proven in my photo. We can discover, for example, the green foliage of the trees reflected in Kafka’s face. All this is no accident. We must understand that nothing the sculptor does is by chance. This sculpture was successful, but it is not because millions of tourists visit here every year to take selfies, because the sculptor was simply lucky. Because he had a good idea and it was successful. By the way, all his sculptures are successful. David Cerny is not an amateur artist. Although he has been working as an academic sculptor for four decades, unfortunately his international criticism defines his art unworthy. Art literature considers him to be ambivalent and provocative. The writers who stated this have not really studied art history and art theory, so they cannot place him normally in contemporary art. Sometimes the careers of Central and Eastern European artists are held back for political reasons. It is necessary to finally accept that there are universities in Central and Eastern Europe that were founded hundreds of years ago and are capable of properly educating talented people, and that this standard corresponds to the level of the world’s largest universities. This is also the case with David Cerny. When he received scholarships in the United States and Switzerland, he did not have to learn who he was as a sculptor and what he would do in his career as a sculptor. For him, these trips were the external effects and inspiration of the first stage of his career. The artist was already a working sculptor at the time. What is my point with all this? Just as the name of the Quadrio business district plays with Italian words, expressions, and the meaning of words, in an absolutely creative and charming way, the sculptor has been working in the same way for four decades: at an academic level, with high quality and professional methods, with innovative technologies. In other words, he works with real artistic creativity in the classical sense. And anyone who has learned the history of art, as every Italian learns, clearly sees and knows that David Cerny is in no way ambivalent and provocative, so he is not an artist that inspires fear, but an extremely intelligent sculptor of academic quality who experiments in all his projects. What does sculptor David Cerny experiment with? An artist who experiments with everything. I elaborate on this topic in my essays about him. Here, as a photographer, I am highlighting his relationship with colors. The sculptor is not an animal. The sculptor also sees colors, like the painter and the photographer. Everyone in Italy knows this. This is where we start from now. David Cerny is a sculptor who can use colors in his works of art like a painter who experiments with colors. This has been the case since the beginning of his career. As I wrote about this previously, this Kafka sculpture is also an excellent example of this. I will highlight an example from his oeuvre: negative art criticism has been formulated in the last four decades about how he uses the color pink in his works. Those who wrote about it did not take into account that David Cerny is a Pink Panther generation artist in the former Czechoslovakia in Central and Eastern Europe. The striking similarity between us is that I am also a Pink Panther generation photographer, because in Hungary we saw the Pink Panther on television at the end of the 80s, when I was still a little girl. Anyone who has seen the Pink Panther on television as a child, teenager or young adult in Central and Eastern Europe has lived through a period of the Pink Panther cult in Central and Eastern Europe, so we in this region think differently about the color pink than people elsewhere. For political and cultural reasons, the color pink has additional meaning for us. In the art of David Cerny, I find this quite clear. So, anyone who wants to interpret the current meanings of the color pink in his art as a fetish, a form of sexual expression, female criticism or an obscene expression, is completely on the wrong track, because they do not know the cultural trends in this region and the history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. I would definitely say that the Pink Panther generation artists in this region are influenced throughout their lives by the experience of living through the Pink Panther cult. We must definitely understand that David Cerny is an intellectual visual artist, a star sculptor with Central and Eastern European academic knowledge. Nothing in his art is accidental, everything has a rational explanation rooted in art history. I think it’s perfectly normal for David Cerny to experiment with colors the way I experiment with them as a photo artist in Photoshop, because in my work that’s what professional high quality art work is all about. (The creators and developers of the American Adobe Photoshop brand, Thomas Knoll and John Knoll, are my namesakes living in the United States. They are not original European Swabians, but real American citizens.) Let’s recall the meaning of the artist’s name, because this way we can absolutely believe that everything in his career is conscious and reasonable, so it is not just based on luck. That is why I do not consider him a particularly provocative artist. The 20th century black humor in literature is also known in the Central and Eastern European region, mainly under the influence of American literature. As a literary historian, I separate black humor from the grotesque. Many artists are influenced by 20th century black humor, myself included. For me, it has roots in Ovid, Jonathan Swift, and Edgar Allan Poe, and I like 20th century writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Merle, and the world-famous Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. That is why I was very happy when I took a portrait of the film director Jiri Menzel on the occasion of his 80th birthday. It would be naive to think that David Cerny does not have this literary background to know the meaning of his name. Those who have this knowledge will incorporate its influence into their art. In other words, I definitely consider it exaggerated that instead of David Cerny’s excellent academic artistic qualities, the literature highlights his provocative ways of expression. I also consider it a mistake, because for the youngest generation, provocation increasingly contains disgusting and stomach-turning elements. This is not in David Cerny’s art, fortunately there is no mention of it, and I am very happy about that. In fact, I would argue that there are many provocative artists in the older generations, compared to whom he seems less provocative, so this qualification is an absolute mistake in the interpretation of his art. However, David Cerny is an extremely important artist of the Central and Eastern European region, whose negative classification is not permissible based on his work so far. Speaking of literature, let’s return to the literature of Franz Kafka. Generation Y, my generation, learned something different about Kafka’s literature than what is taught about it today. Today, Kafka is seen as a writer of anxiety and fear. That’s all they see in him. For me, however, he teaches us about democracy and human rights in the Central and Eastern European region. Before our integration into the European Union, we in this region interpreted him in this way in the 1990s. I don’t think that the sculptor who makes a bust of a world-famous writer, who is his national hero, works by interpreting the anxious qualities of the writer’s literature. Neither does David Cerny. The gigantic head of Kafka’s statue is not because he wants to instill fear with it. Because you want to identify the writer. The sight of the head, which originates from the bust portrait type, does not evoke black humor, or not primarily black humor. For all of this, I consider it really important the critical demand that David Cerny’s artistic works are not classified according to fashionable world trends with one term at a time, but interpreted as an artist of academic quality in good essays. Because there is something to study about his art! If we consider the history of sculpture in global art history, we will come to the right conclusions about Franz Kafka’s head. David Cerny developed the most modern IT, kinetic technology for this sculpture. First, I examine the basic position, then finally the movement. There is also a reflection on ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek sculptural art here. In the basic position of the statue, we can see that the view is indeed futuristic, but recalling Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich’s statements about style: everything goes exactly to its right place, as if obeying a law (The Story of Art, Phaidon, 1950). In the 21st century, this law is determined by the artist himself with computer programming. Looking at the sculpture reminds me of my photo series Egypt, Flowers, Palms. Let’s recall the sight of palm leaves and the structure of the pyramid, which connection was mentioned in the 2022 text of the exhibition. Let’s look at this statue like this, with this knowledge. Think of the pictures and hieroglyphs painted on the walls of the chambers in the pyramids. In ancient times, they were not painted for us, but for the soul of the dead. As Gombrich puts it: the artist did not want to delight, but to keep alive. We have to decide in the 21st century whether David Cerny can delight us with the spectacle that is the environment as a reflection of the surface of the sculpture. Anyone who likes elegance, and I do, will surely be delighted by this sight, that is, the sculpture itself, because this environment around the artwork is made up of the buildings and landscaped ornamental plants of a luxurious financial district. This was the 20th century social environment in Franz Kafka’s time, some of whose buildings survive in perfect form in the 21st century. This type of financial world inspired the literature of Franz Kafka. If we want to be able to interpret Franz Kafka’s literature on a professional high-quality level, as literary historians do, then sculptor David Cerny will help us with this Franz Kafka head sculpture installation here in Prague. It helps because by getting to know the writer’s environment and life, we are able to interpret his literature according to the aspects and goals that he defined. There can be no other literary interpretation of Franz Kafka. If you look closely at my photo, you can see that while I was standing under the foliage of the trees, the ancient Egyptian Aten as the Sole God discovered me and showed himself with some sunbeams reflected on the portrait’s forehead and temples. How good it is that this head has such a large size, because that way how clearly these sunbeams are visible in the photograph! How interesting and beautiful is the view of the sculpture in this natural environment! I don’t attribute any particular meaning to why Franz Kafka’s head is so huge, why this statue became so large. The sculptor is not criticizing the writer, not at all. And the sculptor did not come up with this idea so that it would be better to take a selfie standing in front of the statue. If we think about the modern and futuristic architecture of today’s 21st century and the population of our planet, then we do not feel that the size of Franz Kafka’s head as a sculpture is at all excessive. For me, this size rather expresses that Franz Kafka is able to prevail in the 21st century, so with this composition, the sculptor David Cerny perpetuates his memory into the 21st century, and this is the task of every artist with academic knowledge: the development of the canon of the art history. The sculpture does not necessarily have to move in order to be able to enjoy it. Let’s think about Buddhist art interpretation methods. Let’s think about Kafka’s literary concepts while observing the statue in this refreshing green meditation environment. In this way, we can also discover the basic forms and shapes preferred in Chinese culture under the influence of the sculpture’s reflective surface. The moving statue is also under the control of the sculptor: this has been the case for 10 years, and technical maintenance is regularly carried out on it. The sculptor determines the date of the movement, the duration of the movement and the rhythm of the movement. It does all this in the language of IT. No matter how you look at the head of Franz Kafka in Prague: in its basic position or in motion, it is really a modern construction in a futuristic style even after 10 years. Let’s continue this idea with the moving head of Franz Kafka. Let’s recall Umberto Eco’s thoughts on Italian Futurist speed, and I would like to remind you that Eco quotes from Franz Kafka’s literature regarding the interpretation of time and presents an example of this in his book The Story of Beauty. I wish sculptor David Cerny that in the coming decades his career will be as intensely busy with many new sculptures, many new projects, as this Franz Kafka head in motion. I’m really looking forward to his new sculptures. The reason I’m curious about them is that all of his sculptures have a very good concept. He is a sculptor working with the same type of concepts as Sir Antony Gormley and Bernar Venet, whose art I really like in Western Europe. In the coming decades, David Cerny will rise and develop into the global art market where Antony Gormley and Bernar Venet are available. For those tourists who discover David Cerny’s “Head of Franz Kafka” sculpture in Prague, I recommend that, whether they see it in its basic position or in motion, they stop in front of it to take a selfie and then look into the face of the statue, and then determine what they see: Franz Kafka? An expression of the concept of anxiety? A 20th century writer? A world-famous icon? A Jew? A human? A man? Social concepts? Reflecting yourself? Reflecting Prague’s UNESCO World Heritage Site buildings and modern-style financial buildings? The subjective memory of Franz Kafka’s literature? I will tell you my secret that I see the beautiful face of the sculptor David Cerny in the face of the Franz Kafka statue, because I am a photographer”. – TECHNICAL ISSUES: In Italy, this photo is only available at T.O.E. Art Market and it is the lowest price here in Italy. The photographer provides an authentication document and a bill of sale for the photo. (The photographer is exempt from tax and receives a significant tax discount above a certain amount.) The photo is numbered and signed by the photographer. The price of the photo includes a standard photo frame for the photo, the color can be chosen, as well as the passepartout. Special framing is negotiable. The photographer allows the personal delivery of the ordered photos to Bratislava, Budapest and Vienna, which is the safest way to ensure that the photos are not damaged, so in this case the parcel will not be delivered by courier. The photographer plans to sales her photographs at the Cremona Art Fair and the Lucca Art Fair from around 2027, where she will arrive with the images presented at the T.O.E. Art Market and already a significant selection of images from Italy, with different image sizes and special discounts. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ITA: Forme e motivi architettonici eleganti nell’Europa centrale e orientale (Repubblica Ceca, Romania e Slovacchia), Serie di foto di Anna Linda Knoll – TITOLO: Elegante centro finanziario futuristico, distretto finanziario del Quadrio con la scultura cinetica Testa di Franz Kafka di David Cerny scultore ceco, Praga, Repubblica Ceca, Patrimonio dell’umanità dell’UNESCO – MAGGIORI INFORMAZIONI: – DETTAGLI TECNICI: In Italia, questa foto è disponibile solo presso T.O.E. Art Market ed è il prezzo più basso qui in Italia. La fotografa fornisce un documento di autenticazione e una fattura di vendita della foto. (La fotografa è esente da tasse e riceve uno sconto fiscale significativo al di sopra di un certo importo.) La foto è numerata e firmata dalla fotografa. Nel prezzo della foto è compreso il portafoto standard, il colore è a scelta, così come il passepartout. L’inquadratura speciale è negoziabile. La fotografa consente la consegna personale delle foto ordinate a Bratislava, Budapest e Vienna, che è il modo più sicuro per garantire che le foto non vengano danneggiate, quindi in questo caso il pacco non verrà consegnato tramite corriere. La fotografa pianifica di vendere le sue fotografie alla Cremona Art Fair e alla Lucca Art Fair, dal 2027 circa, dove arriverà con le immagini presentate al T.O.E. Art Market e già una significativa selezione di immagini dall’Italia, con diverse dimensioni di immagine e sconti speciali.

ENG: Anna Linda Knoll was born in Kaposvár, Somogy county, Hungary, Europe. Her father comes from an ancient Swabian family, and her mother is of Hungarian-Yugoslav (Croatian) descent. The artist has been living and working in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, since 2000. Since 2010, her main activity and daily routine has been working on her photography private collection. Contributor to iStock by Getty Images since 2020 and Shutterstock since 2022. She studied at the four largest and most renowned universities in Hungary: Hungarian linguistics, Hungarian literature and world literature, communication and economics (management theory, marketing and business law), and completed a photography course at the Moholy-Nagy University of Arts. Her favorite topics from her studies appear in her private collection in visual form. She has been working as an editor since the mid-2000s, and has been working as an independent since 2010, retraining herself to online editing and creating websites and databases as editor-in-chief. Since 2022, she has been showing her photography exhibitions online from her private collection at the T.O.E. Art Market in Tuscany, Italy, Europe. An online catalog of previous exhibitions is available on her official website: annalindaknoll.com – The artist's languages in sales: English, Italian and German. ////////// ITA: Anna Linda Knoll è nata a Kaposvár, contea di Somogy, Ungheria, Europa. Suo padre proviene da un'antica famiglia sveva e sua madre è di origine ungherese-jugoslava (croata). L'artista vive e lavora a Budapest, capitale dell'Ungheria, dal 2000. Dal 2010 la sua attività principale e routine quotidiana è stata quella di lavorare alla sua collezione privata di fotografie. Collaboratore di iStock di Getty Images dal 2020 e Shutterstock dal 2022. Ha studiato nelle quattro università più grandi e rinomate dell'Ungheria: linguistica ungherese, letteratura ungherese e letteratura mondiale, comunicazione ed economia (teoria del management, marketing e diritto commerciale) e ha completato un corso di fotografia presso l'Università delle arti Moholy-Nagy. I suoi argomenti preferiti dei suoi studi compaiono nella sua collezione privata in forma visiva. Lavora come redattrice dalla metà degli anni 2000 e lavora come indipendente dal 2010, riqualificandosi all'editing online e alla creazione di siti Web e database come redattrice capo. Dal 2022 espone le sue mostre fotografiche online dalla sua collezione privata al T.O.E. Art Market di Livorno. Un catalogo online delle mostre precedenti è disponibile sul suo sito ufficiale: annalindaknoll.com – La fotografa ha studiato italiano a Roma e Firenze e vende le sue fotografie in italiano.