Apartment Block, Kreuzberg — II

Three planes, stepped and overlapping: pink at the bottom, orange in front, green behind, each finished with a pale strip of coping along its upper edge. Between the orange and the green a dark slot opens — the only depth in the picture. Everything else lies flat against the sky.

The colour is not the building’s. It is pushed here further than anywhere else in the series, and at this distance the render stops behaving like a wall: it becomes pigment, and the parapets become edges. Nothing in the frame says that this is a house.

Everything that would fix this as a roof has been left outside the frame: no street, no horizon, no neighbouring building to compare it with. The crop was made at the window, and it was made to remove information. What is left cannot be measured, only compared — plane against plane.

A detail of the block opposite my flat, photographed from the window — the same building that appears whole in Apartment Block, Kreuzberg — I and, emptied of its inhabitants, throughout Das Haus gegenüber. Part of Fremde Fassaden, an ongoing series of colour-shifted façades made in Berlin, with detours to Duisburg, Visby and Douglas. See the other works made in Kreuzberg.