Monographs of Core Cycles from the Œuvre

The Staatsgalerie Series originated from a conceptual blueprint by Bernhard Karlowitz and was initiated beforehand in the executive offices of the then-director of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Sean Rainbird [Director from 2006–2012]. Rainbird authorized the unrestrained execution of this profound art project, which conceptualizes classical painting as a vital, current medium possessing the inherent power to serve as a commentary on contemporary art. The realization took place in the summer of 2009. 

Carrying the profound, visceral impression of the Classical Modernist portrait paintings exhibited on the upper floor, Karlowitz entered the architectural rotunda of the Staatsgalerie—that characteristic viewing platform conceived by James Stirling as a postmodern key monument and artistic statement, overlooking the valley silhouette of Stuttgart. In that precise moment, his creative concept manifested within the immediate synthesis of these two experiences. His portrait project would unfold just meters away from the revered exhibits, situated at a site that functions visually as a point of geographical inevitability. 

The series comprises three large-scale diptychs, each consisting of two square supports with the precise dimensions of 93.3 x 93.3 cm. The massive, sculptural frames were handcrafted in close collaboration with a master carpentry workshop; they feature a remarkable depth of 8.5 cm and project prominently from the gallery wall like tectonic cabinet structures. This extreme frame depth was intentionally designed by the artist so that the work formally embodies and reflects the discourses of Postmodernism, Object Art, and Spatial Installation.In traditional fashion, Bernhard Karlowitz stretched the finest portrait linen over the frames by hand, manually beveling the lateral edges to a rounded finish. Consequently, the painting loses its abrupt limitation and gains an all-encompassing, space-engaging quality: the image flows directly into the real space of the viewer. Particular formal attention was dedicated to the precise folding of the corners, as the deep, wrinkle-free side edges are conceived as an integral, space-occupying part of the artwork itself.

The deep lateral edges are covered by the linen and accurately primed in stark titanium white, allowing the pictorial space to rise plastically from the wall in a museum installation context. Factoring in hanging intervals of 15 to 30 cm between the diptych components and a serial distance of approximately 50 cm between the individual works, the Staatsgalerie Series commands a wall surface of seven to ten meters. It consolidates the physical presence of a contemporary spatial installation in order to defend the premise of Modernism all the more radically through its painterly execution. The precisely balanced bone-glue priming was prepared by the artist himself to satisfy the specific physical requirements of his tempera painting technique. This exact tension endows the supports with the acoustic resonance of a drum. 

The technique selected by the artist is based on a highly specific modification of egg tempera, which he developed through meticulous studio protocols for his widely acclaimed diploma exhibition at the Kassel State Academy of Art in the late 1990s. This process accelerates the classical, layered application of paint into a highly dynamic medium capable of driving a pure alla prima session to formal completion within a precisely calculated window of time. Through a rigorous chromatic structure and subtle glazing, the final blended values emerge within the interplay of the entire pictorial space. The formal scaffolding of a projected expressive-chromatic dynamic empowers the painter with that immediate, liberated gesture which authentically captures each observation in the moment. 

Within this context, the diptychal concept transforms into a manifest symbol inside the contemporary discourse: in the right panel of the diptych, the urban landscape section of the Stuttgart rotunda remains absolutely identical across all three sessions—the exact same motif, the same cropping, the same stable summer weather, the same hour of day, and the same duration of the painting process. Directly juxtaposed to this, the left panel features the portrait of a selected museum guest of that particular day, painted spontaneously and in real time. Through this experimental setup, Karlowitz provides unassailable, painterly proof of the integrity of the painted portrait tradition and the continued validity of Classical Modernism. In the artistic act itself, the painter functions as the medium of art. He does not operate as a backward-looking reminiscent, but rather incorporates the achievements of post-war art via a dialectical method.

Here, the diptych is utilized in an entirely unprecedented manner as an instrument to comment upon the traditions of painting: Karlowitz exploits this historical format neither to contrast narrative layers nor to map a chronology—and least of all to abuse a classical painterly form tradition for a purely decorative-abstract concept.

The painter adopts the tradition of the bust-length portrait in conjunction with urban landscape in a thoroughly classical manner; yet, through the geometric square of the single support alone, he signals a unsettling alienation from the familiarly vertical format of traditional portraiture. This formal friction prepares the viewer to realize that the work as a whole constitutes an actual horizontal layout—a striking contradiction to the assertion of the classically occupied portrait in the left part of the diptych which initially captured the eye.

Shifting the gaze to the right panel, the viewer encounters what was traditionally defined as mere “background” and thus as an incidental, subordinate task within portrait painting. Karlowitz emancipates this hierarchy by allocating the exact same space and painterly dimension to the background. He invests the location and the appreciation of its situational experience with an autonomous, symbolic power, elevating the landscape to an equal counterpart of the human subject within the pictorial space.

Consequently, the diptych no longer functions as a mere vessel serving a painterly execution of the underlying pictorial idea. Rather, the diptychal construction itself, as a pure, autonomous form, becomes the primary vehicle for a cross-pictorial, conceptual overarching statement. By radically upending the classical chain of events consisting of pictorial task, subject matter, and formal fulfillment, the structural architecture of the work does not overshadow the depicted content—the pure painting itself. However, the painter places his traditional, unprovocative, classical painting into the service of an avant-garde, system-critical art concept that constitutes itself through the serial format.

Across a museum-scale wall surface of seven to ten meters of activated wall space, it revolts against the conventionalism of form. Through the serially repeated occupation of the urban-landscape motif—with its concrete reference to James Stirling’s famous rotunda—it counteracts the museum-generic concept of its own venue.

The painting breaks with its traditional role as a mere depiction; it constitutes itself in the spirit of 1970s avant-garde institutional critique as a physical and intellectual reality that forces the contemporary discourse on the possibility of truth in contemporary art into existence in the first place.

Bernhard Karlowitz operates with the argumentative stringency of scientific proof: if the postmodern premise of institutions and curators were true—that the authentic experience of the painterly moment is obsolete and can be replaced by the copyist reproduction of photographs or video stills—then the three right-hand landscape panels of this series would have to be identical.

If the empathetic quality, the self-medialization of the artist in the moment, the vibrations of character, and the existential panic of the instant were meaningless, then the achievements of Cézanne, Kokoschka, Velázquez, or Van Gogh would be antiquated—and the right-hand part of the painting would be three times the same: interchangeable and irrelevant.

Then it would not matter that Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), in his humanizing gaze into the souls of society’s outcasts, anticipated humanism when painting his portraits of persons with dwarfism; then it would not matter that Édouard Manet (1832–1883) captured a dimensional encounter with Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) that defies verbal description and signifies pure painterly poetry; then it would not matter that Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), in a desperate adherence to his impasto, wrested color into the form of the unyielding counterpart in the mirror; and it would not matter that Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), in his hundreds of attempts, translated Hortense Fiquet (1850–1922) into a psychological profile that incorporates the conception of space, shifting it into a flat, compositional coding that typographs the formal element of composition psychologically as never before.

Yet, the respective right-hand work is by no means identical. In its chromatically and gesturally distinct painterly approach, it documents three entirely different artistic responses to the dynamic of each specific encounter between artist, model, and location.

Bernhard Karlowitz’ diptych series thus relegates photorealism—falsely declared as portrait art—to its proper place: it is purely aesthetic surface copyism. The objective and mastery of its painterly form exhaust themselves in the mere effect of a printing-tech aesthetic on paper. This copyism is in no way oriented toward a lived encounter, nor is it even directed toward a three-dimensional artistic observation.

In order to radically force the immediacy of the liberated gesture on a large scale, Karlowitz selectively integrated even the uncorrupted, gestural impulse of his then seven-year-old niece into the creation process of the landscapes—while he himself guaranteed the definitive, formally classical resolution of the work's final form through strict adherence to chromatic sequences and the alternation between translucent glazing and opaque paint application.

Collaborating with a child plunging impetuously into a large-scale adventure of color demanded more from Karlowitz than mere formal control regarding the ultimate overarching composition; in the spirit of Pablo Picasso, it disciplined the artist himself toward a profound openness in his own painterly-gestural rendering of the sitters. Only in this manner was he capable of keeping pace with the child's courageous stroke and achieving a painterly unity within the portrait itself.

This formal discourse stands in direct opposition to the photo-aesthetic, surface-level debate of photorealism. It asserts Pablo Picasso’s premise and the fundamental gestural formal language of Modernism—which generates itself directly out of the painterly act, seeking and defining the artist's position within it rather than abandoning it for a superficial aestheticism—as a symbol for a modern consciousness of art itself.

The chronological sequence of the three sessions documents this conceptual radicalization in detail: during the first portrait session, Karlowitz painted the rotunda entirely on his own. The wall surface was rendered with gestural openness, utilizing the summery, warm tones of travertine. A defining diagonal—the ramp of the rotunda—cuts downward through both panels, structurally connecting the formats. Stirling's architecture functions as the connective link that formally binds the two diptychs with their separate painterly objectives. Within the portrait panel, it provides a high-reaching background, allowing only a hand's breadth of blue sky, before opening the horizon in a descending line out of the left panel into the panorama of the city, which is negotiated in the right panel. In the right-hand panel, this creates a geometric triangle—an unfolding perspective that uncovers the Stuttgart valley, the distant rooftops, and the station tower. The circular ornaments within the architecture were transferred with a loose, gestural hand, yet remained proportionally measured and chromatically aligned in accordance with the artist’s direct observation.

In the two subsequent sessions, the experimental setup altered fundamentally through the collaboration of the seven-year-old niece: the child was permitted to freely mix the colors for her specific motif task, which was discussed beforehand between the two painters. With impetuous impulses, the child injected luminous crystal and ultramarine blue tones into the architecture. The result completely subverted Stirling’s postmodern rigidity: the wall suddenly appeared as though it possessed sparkling diamonds or a concealed stained-glass art which the architect had evidently “forgotten” to incorporate.

This artistic risk demanded the utmost intensity from the painter to defend the formally classical equilibrium of the work's final form. In the third portrait project—following a several-week period of maturity and evaluation—Karlowitz ultimately succeeded in pulling entirely even with the child’s uncorrupted painterly approach. The portrait of Ji Zhang became the painterly climax of the series: from close proximity, it dissolves into a vibrating, colorful network of glazed patches of paint and pure gestural formal discourse, whereas from a distance, it coalesces with immense psychological presence—a mastery of figuration about which her husband would later pass that telling judgment. Karlowitz thus translated Picasso’s demand on the form of painting into the lived-and-painted concept of the series.

Bernhard Karlowitz’ monumental portrait project—conceived over two years of rigorous planning and executed in under 15 hours of pure, highly authentic painting time—dissects the discursive inadequacy of the contemporary art establishment. The work articulates a fundamental critique of the system: it exposes how a style of painting that understands itself as the consistent continuation of the achievements of Classical Modernism is de facto excluded from established institutional competitions.

Art that refuses the dogma that a purely decorative, surface-level discussion of painting is equivalent—or even qualitatively superior—to the profound reflection of authentically generated art is deliberately disqualified with labels such as “retro” or “antiquated.” Art that evades superficial occupation with headline-grabbing statements and short-sighted feuilleton topics in order to function within larger contexts as a medium of fascination and critical inquiry instead is pushed to the margins.

The most prominent example of the 2000s in this regard was the BP Portrait Award hosted by the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London: despite the official call for entries specifying classical painting and the constitutional prohibition of techniques that bypass the immediate artist-model setup, photorealistic copyism was awarded prizes almost exclusively for years. This stood as a glaring contradiction that was vigorously and controversially debated in the British quality press—a critical discourse that, within the German cultural landscape, has failed to take place to this very day. 

It occurred toward the end of the first portrait session in the Stuttgart rotunda that a large, beautiful beetle landed on the sitter. Rather than being startled, the subject was visibly moved by the beauty and boldness of the insect. Bernhard Karlowitz reacted in a split second: he altered the disposition of the model’s hand, which had already been established within the pictorial space, and painted the beetle in the very velocity of the living event, while asking his subject to remain still. The model complied with this request, watching with great amusement as the painter wrestled for both tempo and form.

The gesturally executed hand, featuring the radically immediate beetle, became the unpredictably authentic moment of the entire session. This passage evokes those seemingly “shifted” or gesturally “blurred” hands encountered occasionally within the oeuvre of Édouard Manet (1832–1883), when he attempted to extract a shifted hand once more from the white impasto—desperately following the movement, the pure impulse, as he wrestled for the absolute truth of the moment.

The unassailable validation of this uncompromising path manifested itself immediately after one of the three-hour painting sessions in the Stuttgart rotunda: the husband of the museum visitor who had just been portrayed stepped up to the gallery wall, visibly moved. In a moment of deep reflection upon the artwork and his own observation of the painterly process, he confessed to Bernhard Karlowitz that he was profoundly shaken. Through the sheer power of his artistic observation, the painter had succeeded in exposing a deeply hidden facet within the essence of his wife upon the canvas—a core characteristic of her being that the husband, until that very instant, was convinced no other human being in this world could ever perceive.