Jan Madeus · Berlin
Das Haus gegenüber
One apartment block, seen from the same window, in the same frame, over months. Only the light changes — and everything that makes the building look lived in has been taken out.
The Building Opposite
I have seen half the world with a camera. The series that matters most to me was made from my third-floor window.
There is an apartment block across the street. A parapet, a ladder, a green box on the roof. Every time I came back from sea it was unchanged — the same roof, the same ladder. At some point I started photographing it. Always the same frame, over months. Only the light was different each day.
In post-production I remove what makes the building look inhabited: windows, balconies, laundry, satellite dishes. What remains is a surface. I shift the colours until the building stops giving an account of itself and becomes a form. I studied painting. That is where the gesture comes from.
Sometimes two doves sit on the ladder. Those I leave. They make the emptiness larger, not smaller.
What is Das Haus gegenüber?
Das Haus gegenüber (German for “the building opposite”) is a fine-art photography series by the Berlin artist Jan Madeus. A single post-war apartment block in Berlin-Kreuzberg is photographed from a fixed vantage point across the street, always in the same frame, across many months and many states of light.
Two operations define the series. The colour is shifted into a muted register of ochre, slate blue and weathered green. And every trace of habitation — windows, balconies, laundry, satellite dishes — is removed in post-production, leaving a depopulated surface. Where the artist’s series Fremde Fassaden moves across many buildings, this one stays with a single one and lets time do the work. Occasional birds are kept; they sharpen the emptiness rather than relieve it.
About this series
The series is closed rather than ongoing: one building, one vantage point, one decision applied consistently. What varies is light and weather; what stays fixed is the frame and the removal. Read together, the images work less as views of a house than as one surface passing through a year.
A booklet of the series is available as a PDF. It goes out to First Viewings, the small mailing list that sees new work before it appears anywhere else.
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