Panamarenko - Panamarenko’s Palace – Le siècle de Kafka, 2001

Panamarenko (1940–2019) Panamarenko's Palace – Le siècle de Kafka, 2001 Poster, offset. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Panamarenko's Palace at the Courthouse on Britselei, Antwerp (7–11 December 2001), organized by the Flemish Conference at the Bar. Framed. The poster reproduces a handwritten and hand-drawn design by Panamarenko, printed over the faint translucency of a handwritten letter. Surrounding the block letters PANAMARENKO'S PALEIS are three pencil studies for Le siècle de Kafka: a monument depicting three crowing, Archaeopteryx-like birds standing on a pedestal, with a colored version in the central circle — red plinth, sign “Le siècle de Kafka” — and a small male figure with a hat next to it, as a scale. The motif harks back to a maquette from 1983 that Panamarenko made for a competition with Kafka as the assigned theme; by his own account, he had never read anything by Kafka, but had heard that there was a lot of snow in his novels. At the bottom, in handwriting, the date and, in a circled cartouche, the title.