Fraktur

Fraktur is based on a photograph taken in Berlin's Mitte district, where fragments of the city's architecture, graffiti and everyday life coexist in a constantly changing urban landscape.

The painting is deliberately pared back. A largely unbroken field of deep blue-black surrounds a small, intensely illuminated architectural space, allowing the white walls, vivid graffiti and the silhouette of a solitary figure to emerge almost as fragments from the darkness. The bicycles and other incidental details reinforce the sense of an ordinary Berlin street rather than a deliberately picturesque view of the city.

The title Fraktur refers to the traditional German blackletter typeface, historically associated with German culture and identity. Here it is used more obliquely: the graffiti that covers so many Berlin buildings can be understood as a kind of contemporary script, replacing the formal visual language of the past with something spontaneous, personal and often transient.

As with much of my work, the painting is less concerned with recording a particular place than with what happens when light, architecture, colour and absence are reduced to their essential elements. The city is present, but much of it has deliberately been left unpainted.