Bull & Bear Painting

"Art is not about beauty, it's about the creation of something that expands our power of imagination." Claus Bertermann, born 1965 in Stuttgart, is a German artist painter with origins in architecture. His work is primarily influenced by architecture as well as by art brut, with a preference for abstract art. After studying architecture at the Technische Universität München (Munich) from 1988 til 1992, he achieved his master degree and worked as an architect until the mid-90s, later becoming an entrepreneur and finally immersing into the art world. Claus Bertermann has German and Spanish roots. His grandfather, Guillermo Castañeda, was a Spanish artist painter. Bertermann spent his childhood in Spain with his grandparents, where he grew up surrounded by his grandfather's works and he often watched him paint. There was always that special smell of oil paint and turpentine in the air in the house. Bertermann's work is primarily about transience. He is concerned with the emergence and sedimentation of layers and their future transformation. It is about the present and the past, and the question of the future that inevitably arises from this. Influenced by his architectural education, Bertermann consciously rejects any kind of rules in his work, in a sense as a liberation from the strict structures and specifications of architecture. Painting means freedom for him. And abstract expressionism is for him the highest form of free expression. His way of painting is always impulsive, exposing himself to risk, deliberately unconsidered, intuitive. Structural thinking exists for him only in the structure of the color itself and in the composition. Claus Bertermann uses mainly oil paint, colored ink, acrylic paint and spray. His intellectual mentors and sources of inspiration are Georg Baselitz, Helen Frankenthaler, Jean Dubuffet, Gerhard Richter, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Karel Appel. It was not until Bertermann turned 50 that he felt mentally mature enough to devote himself to painting. As a "late bloomer," he has no time to waste, which is why he maintains a very fluid painting style, deliberately avoiding details and usually working on several works at once.