Gatekeeper (2026): Two Faces, One First Impression
She sits in a deep green armchair, wrapped in a flowing red coat, and looks straight at you. Calm, confident, completely at ease.
But before you reach her, there is someone else to meet.
A condition, not a story
At her feet sits a slender hound with long, dark ears, upright and attentive. He studies you with the same steady gaze as she does. Gatekeeper does not tell what happens next. It shows the first second of an encounter: two faces looking at you at once, and a judgement made before a word is spoken.
Two faces, one first impression
Look closer, and the gatekeeper turns out to be her mirror image. His dark ears fall exactly like her hair, and his eyes have the same deep blue calm as hers.
He is not guarding her from the world; he is welcoming it on her behalf. And judging by their composure, you have already been invited in.
A doorman on the threshold
The hound sits on the hem of her coat, exactly where a doorman would stand, right on the threshold of her world. His head marks the very centre of the canvas, and the whole portrait format is stacked around it: her face at the top, the red coat and green armchair in the middle, the warm orange body of the dog below. Behind them, a glowing yellow wall, a burst of pink, red and orange flowers on the left and a blue curtain on the right.
Freedom below, precision above
The picture is built in two separate moves. First the ground: the yellow wall, the flowers, the curtain, the green masses of the armchair and the red sweep of the coat, laid in with coarse, broad brushstrokes that settle nothing precisely. Then the drawing, on top of that ground: her eyes, hair and lips, the long ears and blue eyes of the hound, the loose red line of the coat spreading to the floor. The line never sinks into the paint; it stays on top. Like every figurative work in this series, the image is built forward, never scraped back — the exact inversion of the abstract series, where surfaces are built over months and cut back into.
A woman and her dog
Gatekeeper joins Affinity and Windspiel in a small group of 2026 paintings about a woman and her dog. Each canvas tells a different chapter of the same quiet partnership: closeness, trust and a shared way of looking at the world.
An architect's scale
At 200 × 150 cm the woman is close to life size, and the hound sits at eye level with a visitor entering the room. Bertermann, who holds a Master's degree in Architecture, uses that scale to make the painting work like a doorway: whoever stands in front of it is greeted first.
Made by a real person — not AI
Like every work in the studio, Gatekeeper is an original, one-of-a-kind painting, made by hand by a real person, not AI. The flaring lines of the coat, the running colour, the two pairs of eyes drawn in a few sure strokes — all of it is intentional, and all of it is the record of a human hand working fast in front of a canvas two metres high.
Gatekeeper, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 200 × 150 cm (height × width). Signed on the front and the back. Part of the figurative works.
→ View Gatekeeper in the gallery
This painting belongs to Claus Bertermann’s 2026 figurative series — large-format works in acrylic and oil stick in which the drawn layer always lies on top of the paint, never in it.