Roth appropriated the imagery for German Cities from black-and-white postcards featuring banal views of landmarks in four cities in Germany. Keeping them true to scale, he reproduced these photographs in an orderly five-by-five grid. Next, he obscured each source image by covering it with a nearly opaque layer of ink, solid except for a shape taken from one of the pictured city’s famed landmarks, such as Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate or Munich’s Frauenkirche. In the grid of twenty-five images, the silhouette of the landmark is purposefully misaligned, matching up only once.
Gallery label from Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth, February 17–June 24, 2013.