Claus Bertermann - Le Café

Artist: Claus Bertermann

OFFICIAL WEBSITE: www.bertermann.art

Claus Bertermann is a 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. "Le Café" belongs to that series and takes it into the founding subject of modern painting: one person at a café table, in public, doing nothing that anyone could name.

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: Le Café
– 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 café is the last place in Europe where sitting still counts as an activity. You buy a cup; what you actually purchase is a chair, a table the size of a dinner plate, and the right to stay there without explaining yourself to anyone.

The young man in "Le Café" has been exercising that right for a while. The cup in front of him is small and nearly finished, the little jug beside it untouched, his chin propped on the back of one hand while the other lies flat and open on the burning orange table top. Every element of that pose belongs to the visual grammar of waiting, and everyone in the room has read it accordingly. The waiter has him filed as a man who has been stood up.

He hasn't. He came early on purpose.

Something arrived at around the third sip, and he is holding very still so as not to frighten it off. That is the twist the painting keeps to itself: from the outside, thinking and waiting look exactly the same. Only the colour gives him away. If this were disappointment, the picture would not behave like this—the table would not be that vermilion, the jacket would not be that cobalt, and a broad stripe of gold light would not be crossing the whole room to land on precisely one shoulder.

Most café paintings in art history are about being alone in a crowd. This one is about the far rarer thing: being alone in a crowd and enjoying it.

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. For collectors, works from the opening year of a new series carry a meaningful provenance marker, and within this series "Le Café" occupies a distinct position: it is an interior—the first fully built room in a body of work otherwise given to streets, figures and open colour fields. The café interior forces the painter to solve three things at once: a figure, a still life and a space, all in the same wet field.

Technically the canvas joins the two languages of Bertermann's figurative practice. The room, the jacket, the table and the light 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 blue contour of the hands and the open collar, the yellow and blue rims of the cup, saucer and jug, the black lines that hold the furniture in place, the green signature at the lower right. Freedom below, precision above—an architect's instinct for structure carrying an expressionist's appetite for colour.

The still life at the lower right is worth noting on its own: three white objects—cup, small bowl and jug—drawn almost entirely in oil-stick line over the orange table. In a canvas of this scale and heat, they function as the calm the whole picture is built around.

Visual description & condition

The composition shows a young man seated behind an orange-red café table, half length, frontal and slightly left of centre. His hair is a mass of red-brown and dark crimson loops; the face is painted pale yellow with a violet-blue shadow down one side, blue-drawn brows and eyes, a red mouth and a warm red patch on the cheek. He wears a deep cobalt and teal jacket open over a pale yellow chest and collar, drawn in blue oil-stick contour. His right elbow rests on the table with the chin propped against the back of the hand; the left arm crosses the picture to the right, the open hand lying flat on the table, fingers described in blue line.

On the table before him stand a white cup with a yellow interior on a blue-rimmed saucer, a smaller white bowl, and a white jug with yellow and blue contour and a band of magenta. A broad stripe of gold and ochre light enters from the upper right and crosses the room to the figure's shoulder.

The background is a café interior built from blue, teal, magenta and orange strokes: at the upper centre a black and yellow form reads as a hanging lamp or coat stand above a pink counter; at the right a green table top stands on dark legs against a pale blue wall; at the left a dark red-brown vertical marks a bench or partition, with a pale yellow field at the far edge. Colours visibly run and merge throughout; perspective and anatomy are intentionally distorted to prioritise emotional weight over realism. The work is signed in green oil stick 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.

The café gave modern painting its first laboratory for observing strangers, and the tradition that came out of it is almost uniformly melancholic: the late-night table, the untouched glass, the figure sealed off from the room around them. Colour in those pictures does the mourning.

"Le Café" uses the same composition and inverts the mood. The room is at its most saturated exactly where the sitter is most at ease, and the light does not isolate him—it finds him. It is a painting about the specific, underrated pleasure of having somewhere to be alone in public, and about how easily that state is mistaken from the outside for something sadder.

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 (approximately 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 (approximately 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.