Claus Bertermann - Madonnina

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. "Madonnina" belongs to that series and takes it somewhere the series had not yet gone: to a devotional figure found by the roadside in Italy, and to the question of scale. The oil stick carries the drawn line throughout—the yellow and grey contours that run down through the red mantle, the black strokes that fold the hands.

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 work from an exciting new series by an artist with a solidified international auction record.

Key details for collectors

– Title: Madonnina
– 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

Travel through Italy long enough and you stop noticing them, which is precisely when they start working on you. A niche cut into a wall at the turn of a road. Inside it, a Madonna the length of a forearm—chipped, repainted by somebody's grandmother in colours no committee would have approved, a plastic flower in front of her, a bulb on a wire above. She is called a “madonnina”: the diminutive. The little Madonna. Italian gives her a small name the way you give a small name to someone you love.

Bertermann saw one of these, and painted her at 130 by 180 centimetres.

That reversal is the entire work. The figure who fits into two cupped hands is given a museum wall. She sits frontally, immovably, her mantle opening across almost the full width of the canvas in a red that behaves like weather, her skirts spreading until they run off both edges. Behind her, two dark arched forms rise like the niches she came from—except that now she has outgrown them, and they have receded into shadow, and the white ground behind her has become as open as sky.

She keeps her hands folded. That is the part that is hard to walk away from. Everything around her has been let loose—colour running into colour, orange bleeding through green, the oil stick tearing yellow lines down through the red like rain on a windscreen—and in the middle of all that motion two small hands stay quietly closed, one over the other, the way hands have been folded in front of these niches for four hundred years by people who were not sure anyone was listening and did it anyway.

The title is a diminutive; the painting is not. Somebody in a village keeps changing those flowers. Nobody ever sees them do it. This is a picture about how much heart fits inside something very small—and what happens when a painter refuses to let it stay small.

Why it is worth the price

This is a large-scale, museum-sized painting (130 x 180 cm) in landscape format from Bertermann's 2026 expressionist series—the body of work in which an internationally collected artist visibly changed direction. For collectors, works from the opening year of a new series carry a meaningful provenance marker: this is the vocabulary that everything after it will be measured against.

Technically the canvas joins the two languages of Bertermann's figurative practice in a single field. The mantle, the skirts, the whole restless white-and-grey ground are 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 yellow and grey lines that fall through the red, the black contour of the folded hands, the fine white scrawl at the lower left, the signature at the lower right. Freedom below, precision above—an architect's instinct for structure carrying an expressionist's appetite for colour.

"Madonnina" also does something rare in contemporary painting: it takes a devotional subject seriously without a trace of irony, and without asking the viewer to believe anything. It is immediately commanding on a wall—a single frontal figure at full landscape width—and emotionally durable in a way that the more knowing works in this genre are not.

Visual description & condition

The composition centres on a single seated female figure, shown frontally and filling almost the entire canvas. Her face is painted pale, with violet-outlined eyes, dark violet lips and green and red shadow worked into the cheeks; long orange-red hair falls on both sides in heavy strokes. Above her head a broad brim reads equally as a wide hat and as a halo, painted in concentric bands of red, magenta, green and blue.

From her shoulders a vermilion mantle opens out across the full width of the picture, laid in with large brushes and torn through with yellow, grey and white oil-stick lines that drip and run. Beneath it she wears a green dress, painted in long vertical strokes, scattered with red and white floral marks. At the centre of the canvas her hands are folded, one over the other, drawn in black and white over pale flesh tones and set into a magenta cuff. To the lower right a mass of pink, mauve and crimson blooms breaks out of the skirt; to the lower left a fine white scrawl of oil stick loops across the green.

Behind the figure the ground is left largely white and grey, brushed loosely. At the upper left and upper right two dark arched forms rise—grey, black and green, drawn over with black grid lines and hung with red—reading as the niches or portals of a wayside shrine. Colours visibly run and merge throughout; perspective and anatomy are intentionally distorted to prioritise emotional weight over realism. The work is signed 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.

"Madonnina" brings that project to one of the oldest subjects in Western painting and approaches it from the street rather than the altar. The Italian roadside shrine—the “edicola”—is folk art in the most literal sense: maintained by no institution, funded by nobody, repainted by hand, kept alive by people who will never be named. Bertermann paints its occupant at the scale the institutions reserve for their own altarpieces, and lets the colour do what village colour actually does: clash, glow, refuse restraint. What remains at the centre, quiet and unmoved inside all that noise, is a pair of folded hands.

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 AI-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.