A face made of empty space

Jan Skácel gets almost the opposite treatment: a face is present, but only because the air between stainless-steel tubes lets you assemble it. Jiří Sobotka's 2016 monument is an open welded structure that the city's own description compares to a monumental digitalisation of the poet's face. Walk sideways and the portrait changes; from some angles you can look straight through it. The stone base adds four words connected with recurring themes in Skácel's poetry, while a QR code opens an acoustic layer of poems and biographical material. This is public sculpture doing something a printed biography cannot: making absence, transparency and viewpoint part of the portrait.