The Floor at Galerie Halbtag Has 1,146 Pencil Marks. Someone Checked.

The man in the mustard anorak had been at the painting for twenty minutes when the attendant brought him a stool.

He did not sit. He leaned in, nose a hand from the surface, lips moving. Every few seconds a finger rose and stopped short of the linoleum. A sign by the door asks visitors not to touch. He obeyed it with his whole arm.

The work is Waiting Room Floor (Ochre) by Dagny Pohl. It measures 210 by 150 centimetres. Three strips of linoleum from a closed housing office in Cottbus are butted together and painted in oil. The ochre is thin at the edges and thick in the middle, where it has been scraped back and put on again. Under it you can still see the old floor. Grey marbling. A burn the size of a coin. One seam that has lifted a finger's width and been left that way.

Across the surface Pohl has sanded a path. It starts at the lower right edge and ends at a pale rectangle near the top left, about the size of a door. The path is bare, the colour of cardboard. Along both sides run pencil tally marks in bundles of five. They are neat at first. Then they lean. Near the rectangle they crowd.

Galerie Halbtag is a former locksmith's on Pannierstraße. It opens at noon. By half past, the sun comes through the front window and lays a hard bar of light across the room. The marks near the door go silver in it. The man waited for the bar to move off them. Then he went on.

He finished at 12:52. He had 1,146. He said it twice to the attendant, who wrote it on the back of an envelope and put the envelope in a drawer. She said the gallery had never had a number before.

Pohl came out of the back room with half a pear. She is from Cottbus and says little. The man told her the count. She nodded at the floor.

"I stopped when my number came up," she said.

He asked which number.

"I don't remember."

He went back to the left edge and started again.