Claus Bertermann - Affinity

Artist: Claus Bertermann

OFFICIAL WEBSITE: www.bertermann.art

Claus Bertermann is an internationally established contemporary artist whose market profile is backed by international market authority and exceptional secondary market results. Known for his powerful, large-format abstract works, Bertermann has consistently commanded high-tier prices at the world’s most prestigious auction houses. His top realized prices include €18,900 at C. h. r. i. s. t. i. e´s Paris (Retro Zen), €15,240 at S. o. t. h. e. b. y´s Cologne (F5TP#CB), and €15,120 at C. h. r. i. s. t. i. e´s Paris (Whispershade). With additional successful sales at V. a. n. H. a. m, A. r. t. c. u. r. i. a. l, T. a. j. a. n, and D. o. r. o. t. h. e. u. m, Bertermann’s work is a proven asset for serious collectors worldwide.

The New Expressionist Series Continues

With a Master’s degree in Architecture (TU Munich), Bertermann originally gained global recognition for his "architectural strata" technique—layering and scraping oil paint to build spatial depth. In 2026 he opened a radically new chapter: figurative scenes painted wet-in-wet with large brushes, guided by the painters of German Expressionism—distorted perspectives and heightened, emotionally charged colour. "Affinity" is the second portrait of that young series and its first double portrait: two protagonists, one human and one not, sharing a single interior on equal terms. The oil stick carries the drawn line throughout—the violet contour that circles the dog and returns, unchanged, around the woman’s eyes.

International Artistic Footprint

With more than 1,000 large format works in private and institutional collections across the globe—including a monumental triptych at his alma mater, the Technical University of Munich—Bertermann continues to bridge the gap between rigorous structure and intuitive freedom. This Catawiki offering presents a rare opportunity to acquire a key portrait from an exciting new series by an artist with a solidified international auction record.

Key details for collectors

– Title: Affinity
– Year: 2026
– Dimensions (H x W): 130 x 180 cm (51 × 71 inches)
– Medium: Acrylic and oil stick on canvas
– Signed by the artist on the front and back side
– Original, one-of-a-kind artwork - MADE BY A REAL PERSON, NOT AI.
– Ships rolled without frame

What makes this piece unique

A woman sits on a deep red sofa in a dark blue robe. On the floor in front of her sits a yellow dog. Between them, on a dark table, stand two small chess pieces. Everyone who looks at this painting arrives with the same assumption already made: she is the mind, he is the company.

Look at what the paint actually decided. In the entire canvas, exactly two things share a colour—her face and the whole body of the dog. The same lemon yellow, the same violet oil-stick line drawn around both, the same violet used for her eyes and for his. Nothing else on the picture is treated that way. The affinity of the title is not written into the scene as sentiment; it is administered as pigment. She has his colour. He has her face.

And then the turn. Her hand is open above the board—but she is not looking at it. Her eyes go straight out of the painting, calm and slightly unfocused, the expression of someone whose move was made a long time ago and who has stopped waiting for the reply. The dog's eyes are angled down and to the left. They are on the pieces. In a picture that contains exactly one game, the hand belongs to her and the attention belongs to him, and the only player still calculating is the one who was supposed to be the pet.

That is the quiet joke and the real subject: affinity is not what two beings have in common, it is how they divide the labour. Spend enough years beside another creature and you stop duplicating each other and start handing things over. She has handed him the part that requires thinking. He has accepted it the way dogs accept a job—completely, and without ever mentioning it. The painting leaves the obvious question hanging in the air, unanswered and slightly alarming: if he is playing, who is he playing against—and how long has she been losing?

Why it is worth the price

This is a large-scale, museum-sized painting (130 x 180 cm) in landscape format, and the second portrait of the new expressionist series after "La Sentinelle"—the point at which the series stops painting a single figure and lets two protagonists hold one room. For collectors that is a meaningful provenance marker: this canvas is where the series learns to stage a relationship.

Technically the work joins the two languages of Bertermann's figurative practice in one field. The interior—sofa, robe, table, the whole restless background of violet, green and orange—is painted wet-in-wet with large brushes, colours bleeding into each other while the paint is still live. Over that fluid ground the oil stick does the drawing: the violet contour around the dog, the black lines that describe his muzzle, chest and paws, the green sweep of both hands, the signature in green at the lower right. Freedom below, precision above—an architect's instinct for structure carrying an expressionist's appetite for colour.

"Affinity" combines that painterly force with a subject that keeps working long after the first look: a devotion picture that turns out to be a picture about who is actually in charge. It is immediately commanding on a wall and conceptually durable in a collection.

Visual description & condition

The composition centres on a woman seated behind a dark table, shown from the hips up, her blue-black hair swept back above a lemon-yellow face modelled with green shadow, violet-outlined eyes and dark red lips; her gaze meets the viewer directly. She wears a deep blue robe with a black collar, opened over a dark interior, with strokes of red, ochre and white worked wet into the blue. To her right the sofa rises in flame orange and vermilion, edged in violet and black oil-stick line; to her left the upholstery breaks into red, black and yellow. Both hands are drawn in green oil stick over pale yellow, open and raised above the dark table—the left hand above the chess pieces, the right hand beside the dog's head.

In the lower right of the picture sits a lemon-yellow dog, seen from the front, his whole silhouette circled in a heavy violet line with black drawn strokes for muzzle, chest and legs; his nose and eyes are violet, his head angled slightly down and to the left. On the dark table between the two figures stand two small yellow chess pieces above a thin red line; a further dark piece stands in the shadow behind them.

The background is deliberately unstable: a lavender field at the upper left with orange and black gestural marks, a pale green band at the right edge, a blue and violet rectangle upper right, and a black bird-like form at the top. Colours visibly run and merge throughout; perspective and anatomy are intentionally distorted to prioritise emotional weight over realism. The work is signed in green at the lower right.

The work is unframed and not stretched. Condition is excellent. All surface irregularities are intentional and integral to the artist's process.

Background / artistic context

Claus Bertermann works within contemporary expressive figurative painting, focusing on states of being rather than mere representation. With his 2026 series he placed the human figure inside charged colour situations, drawing directly on the legacy of German Expressionism: bent perspective, heightened colour, and a surface kept deliberately fluid. "Affinity" moves that project indoors and into company—a genre with a very long history, the sitter with the animal, in which the animal has traditionally been an attribute of the owner: loyalty, status, virtue.

The title returns the word to its stricter meaning. Affinity does not describe two things that are alike; it names the pull between things that are not—the tendency of unlike substances to combine. Bertermann paints exactly that: two different creatures rendered in the same yellow and bound by the same violet line, and a small game on the table that quietly redistributes the intelligence in the room. The result is a companion portrait painted the way long companionship actually works—not as sameness, but as a division of labour nobody ever agreed to out loud.

Practical details for buyers:

Original, one-of-a-kind artwork
Acrylic and oil stick on canvas
Dimensions (H x W): 130 x 180 cm (51 × 71 inches)
Signed by the artist on the front and back side
Certificate of authenticity included
Shipped rolled (not framed or stretched)
Professional packaging and worldwide shipping with premium shipping companies like UPS.

The canvas includes an additional continuous white border of approximately 10 cm (approx. 4 inches) on all sides beyond the painted surface. This margin allows the artwork to be professionally restretched on museum-quality stretcher bars up to 6 cm (approx. 2.4 inches) in depth, resulting in a clean, frameless, gallery-style presentation without the need for a decorative frame.

Please note that the artwork is sold unframed and without stretcher bars. Professional stretching is the responsibility of the buyer. The painting is shipped rolled for safe international transport and flexible installation according to the buyer's preference.

The artwork is signed on both front and reverse, with title, year, and the artist's full name inscribed on the back.

Please note regarding the room views:

Some of the photographs show the painting digitally placed in an interior. These room views are visualisations, created to give an impression of scale and presence only — they are not photographs of the actual work hanging in a room. Both the size proportions and the colours shown in them may differ from the original. The binding references are the dimensions stated above (H x W) and the studio photograph of the painting itself. Please also note that colours may appear differently depending on screen calibration.