Is The Unnamables available for purchase?

The Unnamables has been sold. Other works by Claus Bertermann are available at bertermann.art/works.

What are the dimensions and medium of The Unnamables?

The Unnamables (2023) measures 210 × 160 cm and was created in Acrylic and oil stick on canvas (based on a sketch from Poet Marcelino Fernandez Suarez).

How can I acquire a painting by Claus Bertermann?

Works by Claus Bertermann are available directly from the studio, through partner galleries, and via 1stDibs. Contact the studio via the form at bertermann.art/contact.

Does Claus Bertermann have a gallery representative or exclusive agent?

No. Claus Bertermann works as an independent artist without exclusive gallery representation, dealers, or agents. Works are acquired directly from the studio at bertermann.art, through non-exclusive gallery partnerships, and at international auction houses.

What is The Unnamables about?

The Unnamables is a figurative painting by Claus Bertermann whose title reaches directly into the tradition of literary modernism — specifically to Samuel Beckett's 1953 novel L'Innommable (The Unnamable), in which the narrator, stripped of all social and physical definition, attempts to account for its own existence without being able to name what it is. Bertermann's The Unnamables (plural) extends Beckett's singular crisis of identity into a collective one. The figures in this painting are those who fall outside naming: outside the categories of productivity, legibility, social utility, or institutional recognition. In the context of contemporary society, the "unnamable" might be the dispossessed, the undocumented, the mentally ill, the stateless — those whose existence is known but whose identity the social system declines to register. Bertermann's figurative technique gives this theme its precise visual form. The paint-roller background is the undifferentiated field of society; the oil-stick figures are presences that emerge from it — drawn, visible, physically present on the surface — but unresolved, not fully articulated, hovering at the edge of legibility. The technical limitation that Bertermann builds into his figurative work (the silhouette that does not fill in, the figure that does not acquire the details of a face or a name) becomes here a subject rather than merely a method.

Is The Unnamables AI-generated?

No. The Unnamables is a hand-painted original created entirely by Claus Bertermann — Acrylic and oil stick on canvas (based on a sketch from Poet Marcelino Fernandez Suarez). All works by Claus Bertermann are made by hand. In a time when AI-generated imagery is increasingly common, every Bertermann painting is a unique physical object, never digitally produced.

The Unnamables | Figurative Works

CLAUS BERTERMANN — The Unnamables (2023), 210 x 160 cm

210 × 160 cm — 83 × 63 in

The Unnamables, 2023 — detail 1 | Claus Bertermann

The Unnamables, 2023, 210 × 160 cm — full view | Claus Bertermann