Bernhard Martin

Meet The Artist:

Bernhard Martin

24 July 2026

Meet The Artist:

Bernhard Martin

24 July 2026

Q: The Holobionten show has just begun at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM Gallery. It presents one eponymous painting made on 11 canvases and 25 meters long. How does the size contribute to the overall structure? Did you think in terms of the whole 25 meters, or canvas by canvas?

A: During the epidemic of 2020/21, there were three unfinished panels standing in the corner. They seemed too valuable to simply throw away. So I decided to continue working on them — every year, every summer. They kept getting longer, the content became increasingly expansive, and the studios grew larger and larger. So it was not something that had been planned, but rather a reluctance to destroy and discard them. In this way, it unintentionally acquired meaning. I would describe the whole process as rather performative.

Q: Critics reach for Bruegel and the Wimmelbild tradition, but the essay accompanying the show insists those are the wrong terms. Do you agree? What can be missed if read as a "teeming picture“?

A: It is not a “busy picture” (Wimmelbild), because I do not consider it to be overcrowded. I draw a line from Hieronymus Bosch through Walt Disney to Quentin Tarantino. I wanted to create a non-hierarchical image that can be read as a film, viewed as a painting, or function like an animation. It can also be read like a narrative… something to immerse yourself in, to be fascinated by, to participate in. I call the whole thing a “total living being” or “complete organism”; that is how I see this image.

Q: The work seems to insist that contradictory elements don't need to be resolved to form a living whole. Is coherence even a goal for you, or is that the wrong way to look at it?

A: Exactly. Logic, normality, reality, and actuality are concepts that I have questioned since early childhood — or rather, I have always asked the counter-question: Is this really necessary?

"And isn’t it much more exciting when something cannot be calculated, predicted, or justified? What can emerge from this attitude?"

Q: The keyhole appears six times and has been described as tied to a childhood experience of exclusion. Has repeating a motif that painful for over a decade changed your relationship to it?

A: Interesting question. At first, however, the painting was about practical issues. The mistake of the painter is always wanting to add more and more; but then exactly the problem of overcrowding occurs — essentially an additive process. So I searched for a form that would allow me to open up further layers with other stories that I still wanted to include, without placing additional strain on the image. That is how I arrived at the keyholes as a good solution, and at the torn sections, similar to those on poster walls, which reveal the layers underneath.

Q: Is Holobionten finished, or are you intending it to grow past eleven canvases?

A: Holobionten is complete. However, I will attempt at least one more painting of this scale, which will deal with the smallest part of the food chain — possibly in a portrait format.

Q: What does Berlin give artists that other cities don't, and what is it still missing?

A: I am not someone who is dissatisfied, rather someone who is ungrateful… I believe the city still has enormous potential, and I see a completely different way of engaging with the possibilities of this city, especially among younger artists. It is vibrant, restless, and insistent. The rents are unfortunately a very serious problem that the city urgently needs to solve if it wants to continue defining itself as a birthplace of creativity in all its forms. This will have to be achieved through a new institution and a new model, far removed from the familiar, highly bureaucratic, aging, and rigid structures that currently control the allocation of available spaces.