Liliums XL (2026) — It Was Never About the Lilies
They are, without question, the loudest flowers in the room — and that is the joke. Liliums XL takes the lily, the most over-painted bloom in the history of art, veteran of altarpieces and tasteful still lifes, and hands it back its volume. Petals thrown open like starfish in neon orange and acid yellow, leaning out of a jungle-green thicket with the confidence of flowers that have no intention of behaving. The painting tells no botanical story. It presents something simpler and more honest: the act of painting, with the flower as its excuse.
A pretext, not a still life
Bertermann is candid about it — the subject is not the lily but the painting of it. The botanical fact is merely the permission slip that lets the hand move: the rolled-on color, the dragged drips, the white contour lines that refuse to stay inside any petal they were assigned to. What you are really watching is a record of decisions made fast and never taken back. This is the more concentrated of two paintings made in the same burst — a tighter, square companion to the wide-format Liliums XXL.
Painted with a roller, drawn with an oil stick
For his figurative works, Claus Bertermann deliberately changes his physical process. The acrylic ground is applied not with brushes but with a paint roller and wide brush — tools that force broader arm movements and reduce fine control. The result is a raw, charged field that keeps the momentum of the body visible inside the surface.
The flowers and their contours are then drawn directly with oil stick — intuitively, and independently of the painted ground. The lines do not follow the surface underneath; they cut through it and wander off the edges of the petals. This separation between rough painterly field and assertive drawing is where the painting gets its tension: structure on one side, release on the other.
Built forward, not scraped back
Collectors who know the abstract series will recognise the difference immediately. In the abstracts, layers are applied and scraped back again — the image emerges by removal. Liliums XL is built the opposite way: forward only. Coarse acrylic first, decisive oil stick contours on top. Nothing is taken back; every move stays.
Made by a real person — not AI
Like every work in the studio, Liliums XL is an original, one-of-a-kind painting, made by hand by a real person, not AI. The marks of the roller, the breaks in the oil stick line, the small irregularities of the surface — all of it is intentional, and all of it is the record of a human body moving in front of the canvas.
Liliums XL, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 150 × 150 cm (height × width). Signed on the front and the back. One of a pair with Liliums XXL. Part of the figurative works.