Jan Madeus · Berlin

Fremde Fassaden

Façade photography: walls, corners and painted surfaces, photographed straight on. What began as painting on canvas continues here as colour, structure and the space in between — a series made in Berlin, Duisburg and on Gotland. Prints in small, numbered editions.

The series, in short

What is Fremde Fassaden?

Fremde Fassaden (German for “strange façades”) is an ongoing fine-art photography series by the Berlin artist Jan Madeus — his body of colour-shifted architecture. Trained as a painter, he photographs modernist and brutalist building fronts head-on and shifts their colour, turning ordinary Berlin façades into flat, abstract fields: architecture read as painting rather than record.

The building is the raw material, not the subject — colour is. This is contemporary art that uses photography as its medium: not a photograph of a building, and not a décor print. The images are frontal, unpeopled and reduced. Each is released as a signed, numbered archival pigment print on Hahnemühle paper, in editions of 15, 10 or 5 — once sold, never reprinted — made in Berlin with detours to Duisburg, Visby and the Isle of Man.

Façade photography: yellow painted wall with a shuttered window, Berlin

Facade detail in Berlin-Kreuzberg, window and rendered wall

Black and white building edge with hard shadow, Berlin

Architectural study, facade divided by a geometric shadow

Building edge against sky and clouds, Berlin

Minimal facade detail in Berlin, plain wall and shadow line

Window with a rolled shutter, Berlin-Kreuzberg

Colourful building front in Berlin-Kreuzberg

Building front with green and yellow panels

Industrial architecture detail in Duisburg

Urban hospital building, pipes against a rendered wall

Window light and shadow falling across a floor, Douglas, Isle of Man

Colour-shifted pink and yellow façades beneath a gradient sky, Berlin

About this façade photography series

Fremde Fassaden began with a habit from painting: standing in front of a surface long enough for it to stop being a wall. The photographs keep that distance. No people, no weather drama, no wide-angle heroics — only the plane itself, the colour someone chose for it years ago, and the light that happens to be crossing it.

The series is ongoing. Most frames come from Berlin, with detours to Duisburg, Visby and the Isle of Man. Every image is available as an archival pigment print on Hahnemühle paper in a small, numbered edition.

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