Sima Levin: A Dialogue with Kafka

Sima Levin presents a new project featuring a series of engravings and woodcuts, created especially for her solo exhibition at the Hermann Struck Museum. In this series the artist combines the daily reality of her studio work with the figure and stories of Franz Kafka. These works create a visual texture that fuses reality and imagination, captivating the viewer with its melancholy and seductive European atmosphere. Literature and visual art maintain a relationship of fruitful interaction, and in this sense Levin's works are associated with Hermann Struck's wide-reaching engagement with bookmaking.

From a text the artist wrote about her work:

“A formative event in my private life caused me to reread the works of Franz Kafka.

In 2014 I returned to my memories from the magical and mystical city of Prague. I felt as if Kafka himself was strolling with me through the streets of Prague's old city. This is how the figure of the 'small man' was created, a man dressed in black who strolls with me through the city's narrow alleyways, explaining that 'large wars are born from small words.'

Kafka has certainly impacted artists in all media, including the plastic arts. He lived and worked in the period of the First World War and of the German Expressionist movement. The artists of the famous Die Brücke (The Bridge) movement themselves influenced, and were influenced by his works.

In The Trial, the protagonist wakes up one morning to find he has been charged with an offense – an absurd situation causing frustration and anxiety. Thoughts about man as a personality, and society's treatment of the individual, caused me to reread the novella The Metamorphosis and the novel The Castle. It was not my intention to illustrate Kafka's works, but rather to convey an eternal Kafkaeque atmosphere that is still relevant to our times.”

(Sima Levin, 2018)

Sima Levin was born in Kishinev, Moldova, 1957. She lives and works in Afula.