Claus Bertermann - Cosplay Royale

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.

Four Hundred Years of Dressing Up

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 his figurative work he reverses that discipline: broad fields of acrylic are laid down fast and loose, and the figures are then drawn straight over the bright, still-wet ground in oil stick—built forward, not scraped back. "Cosplay Royale" turns that method on a quietly subversive subject: a woman in full medieval court dress who is almost certainly not from the Middle Ages.

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 offering presents a rare opportunity to acquire a museum-scale figurative portrait from an artist with a solidified international auction record.

Key details for collectors

– Title: Cosplay Royale
– Year: 2026
– Dimensions (H x W): 130 x 180 cm (51 x 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

Every royal portrait ever painted was a costume drama. The ruff took two servants and half a morning to set. The white face was lead paint. The sleeves were padded, wired, and worth more than the horse. For four centuries, the most expensive thing in a state portrait was never the person—it was the outfit, and everyone in the room knew it.

Claus Bertermann simply moved that fact forward to 2026 and let it stand there.

His sitter wears the whole apparatus: the wide lavender-white ruff, the enormous orange sleeves ribbed like a pumpkin, the laced bodice, the chalk-pale face with its painted red mouth. It is impeccable. It is also, unmistakably, made by hand at a kitchen table—the lacing is cord, the seams are drawn on, the collar is held up by will. This is not a duchess. This is somebody who spent six months sewing a duchess, and who is now standing in a dark hall waiting to be photographed.

And she is bored.

That is the whole painting. She has propped her head on her hand in the oldest pose in Western art—the melancholic thinker, the contemplative sovereign, the gesture that in a 16th-century portrait would signify the weight of the crown. Here it signifies that her feet hurt. Her eyes drift sideways, half amused, entirely elsewhere. The pose is perfect and the person inside it has stopped performing, and Bertermann catches her in exactly that gap.

There is no throne behind her, no drapery, no coat of arms—only black. The single most reliable prop in the history of aristocratic portraiture has been removed, and without a palace to stand in, the costume has to do all the work. It does. It just no longer proves anything.

Why it is worth the price

This is a large-scale, museum-sized painting—130 x 180 cm—built on a joke that keeps opening. Read fast, it is a magnificent Renaissance portrait in savage colour. Read slowly, it is a portrait about the fact that Renaissance portraits were themselves a kind of cosplay, and that the impulse to dress up as someone more significant than yourself has not changed in four hundred years—only the budget has.

Bertermann couples the speed of the handling—fast acrylic fields, decisive oil-stick line—with a trained architect's instinct for structure, so that a ruff, a laced bodice and two vast sleeves never lose their volume or their place in space. The face is the quietest passage in the picture and the reason it holds a room: pale, precise, and slightly weary inside a storm of orange. For collectors it offers the best of Bertermann—expressive, high-key force disciplined by composition, on a subject with the staying power of good satire.

Visual description & condition

The composition is a wide, half-length portrait that fills almost the entire canvas. At its centre a woman rests her cheek against her raised right hand, head tilted, drawn in confident contour over broad, gestural fields of acrylic. Her face is painted in cool mint-white with dark arched brows, eyes ringed in turquoise and deep green, and a vivid orange mouth; fine green and red oil-stick lines trace across the cheek and jaw. Her hair is a mass of deep blue and violet, ringed with orange.

She wears a broad, shovel-shaped ruff in white and pale lavender. Below it, an orange laced bodice is worked over with white and lilac cord, drawn as loops and cross-lacing in oil stick. The sleeves are the picture's engine: two enormous rounded volumes in flat, brilliant orange, one at each side, ribbed with violet oil-stick lines that read as seams and padding. Her left hand, painted in white with black contour, rests over the lacing at the lower centre. A block of acid green sits at the lower right, and the background is near-black, interrupted by a green sweep at the upper right and long red-orange runs of paint at both edges. Colour is pushed past description into pure sensation: flame-orange, violet, acid green and chalk white against black. The work is signed "Bertermann" in red 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, focused on states of being rather than mere representation. "Cosplay Royale" places a single figure inside the visual language of the historical state portrait—ruff, puffed sleeves, whitened face, contemplative hand—and then strips away everything that would make the claim credible: the setting, the lineage, the seriousness. What remains is the costume and the person wearing it, which was arguably always the actual content of the genre.

Technically the work belongs to the strand of his figurative practice built on separation: a fast, painterly acrylic ground overlaid with independent oil-stick drawing, the image constructed forward rather than layered and scraped like his abstracts. Perspective and anatomy are pushed past realism to give the sitter her weight, and the highest-key colour in Bertermann's palette is used to do what gold leaf and ermine once did—to announce importance, and to let the viewer decide how much of it to believe.

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 x 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.