Liliums XXL (2026) — A Flower Riot, Two Metres Wide
Give a lily a stage nearly two and a half metres wide and something has to give. In Liliums XXL, the most ceremonious flower in art — veteran of altarpieces and polite still lifes — is dragged into full daylight, blown up to monumental scale, and painted in colors no botanist would sign off on: neon orange petals, acid-yellow throats, hot-pink edges, all flung open against a jungle of electric green and deep blue. It is less a flower study than a flower riot. And the riot is the point.
A pretext, not a still life
Bertermann says it plainly — the true subject is not the flower but the act of painting it. The botany is just the excuse that gets the hand moving: the rolled-on grounds, the long blue drips that bleed downward, the white oil-stick contours that wander off the edges of the petals they were meant to describe. What is recorded here is not a garden but a sequence of fast, irreversible decisions, scaled up until they fill the room. This is the larger and more panoramic of two paintings made together on the same subject — the wide companion to the square Liliums XL.
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, across a surface wide enough to demand whole-body gestures. 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. This separation between rough painterly field and assertive drawing is where the painting gets its tension: structure on one side, release on the other — and at this width, that tension becomes almost architectural.
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 XXL 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 XXL 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 a 2.4-metre canvas.
Liliums XXL, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 150 × 240 cm (height × width). Signed on the front and the back. One of a pair with Liliums XL. Part of the figurative works.