Intent

To begin mapping the locations of the original Berlin customs wall gates — the Akzisemauer — starting with the Brandenburg Gate, the only one still standing. The discovery that the customs wall gates overlapped with the Cold War wall, and that many U-Bahn stations still carry the names of those gates (Kottbusser Tor, Hallesches Tor), made the subject feel alive and present rather than purely historical. The series emerged from wanting to see the Cold War wall in a longer timeline — one that preceded it and continued after it.

Formal contribution

This painting establishes the originating logic of the Gates of Perception series — the customs wall gates as outward-facing markers of urban growth, in deliberate contrast to the Cold War wall's logic of enclosure. As the first work made on arrival in Berlin, it represents both a continuity with the San Francisco transfer paintings and the starting point of a deliberate evolution: fully painted here, progressively deconstructed across the sixteen works that follow. The choice of the 1899 photograph positions the painting at the intersection of two timelines — the photograph's moment and the painting's making — while the subject extends that span further, placing contemporary Berlin within the longer history of the city's walls and gates. It is the most publicly recognised work in the Berlin body of work, and the image that made the less obvious subjects of the series possible.

Vision analyses

• Jul 11, 2026claude-fable-5

  The composition is a square field divided horizontally into two nearly equal registers: an upper half of flat, unmodulated pale sky blue with no cloud or gradient, and a lower half where a black-and-white photographic scene is embedded within hard-edged planes of painted color. The photographic passage sits at the center of the horizon line — a broad public square seen at ground level, anchored by a neoclassical gateway with a colonnade and a sculptural group of horses and a chariot at its crown, flanked by lower classical buildings and a tall ornate lamppost just left of center. The photograph does not fill its register; painted planes crop into it from both sides — a grey block with a dark hedge-like band at left, a warm terracotta-orange block abutting a near-black block at right — so the photographic space reads as a window held open between abstractions. The ground plane is where paint takes over most assertively. A wedge of pale cream fans forward from the photograph's center to the bottom edge, widening as it comes, like a beam of light or a carpet unrolled toward the viewer, while flat mid-grey fields flank it on both sides. Photographic figures — pedestrians in long dark dresses, frock coats, bowler hats, several carrying parasols, and a horse-drawn carriage in the middle distance — walk out of the photographic zone and onto this painted ground, their grayscale bodies casting no shadows on the cream and grey. The figures nearest the viewer are the largest and most isolated, spaced like notes across the wedge. The coexistence of moments here is quiet but structural: the photographic material — the dress, the parasols, the carriage, the fine grain — belongs unmistakably to the turn of the twentieth century, while the flat color planes that hold it are contemporary in their crispness and matte evenness, closer to hard-edge abstraction or architectural rendering than to anything in the photograph's own era. The painted blocks at left and right occupy the positions where buildings would continue, as if the present had replaced the photograph's periphery with color swatches, leaving only the central monument and its crowd intact. Nothing blends: the seam between photograph and paint is exact, and the figures crossing it carry their period with them onto the abstract ground. Technically, the photographic areas show fine, even reproduction with slight softness consistent with an enlarged historical print, and the transfer or printing process leaves faint texture visible in the sky field on close inspection. The painted planes are hard-edged and matte, with clean ruled seams; the cream wedge's edges are perfectly straight, giving the light-beam reading a constructed, diagrammatic quality rather than an atmospheric one. What resists confident description is the status of the cream wedge: it behaves simultaneously as cast light entering from the gateway, as a road or path, and as a purely formal division of the ground plane, and the image supports all three without settling. Similarly ambiguous is the dark green band at left — hedge, shadow, or painted stripe — and whether the grey planes flanking the wedge are pavement in shadow or simply paint refusing to depict anything at all.