Bernard Bolter

Brandenburg Gate . 1947-1961-2020

CHeckpoint Charlie . 1961-2025

Reichstag . 1971 - 2020

Vietnam War in Video Stills

Brandenburg Gate 1857-1984

World War Two

A painting examining how the recording medium doesn't just document war but actively manufactures the moral narrative attached to it — using color photography (WWII's dominant recording medium, versus WWI's black-and-white) and a central quoted image (the Khaldei Reichstag flag photograph) known to be staged and darkroom-edited.

World War One

This is a painting about medium hidden in the fog of war — using the physical density and chaos of compositing dozens of photographs to make the recording medium itself, not just the war it depicts, the subject.

Almadinat Alearabia

A satellite-imagery collage merging nine Arab League cities — Cairo, Baghdad, Riyadh, Amman, Algiers, Casablanca, Dubai, Damascus, Beirut — into one continuous urban geography.

Turkiye Sehri

Bulowstrasse 1912-2022

Berlin Wall . 1961-2020

Friedrichstrasse 1912-2022

Potsdammer Platz 1912-2022

Berlin 1911-2011

New York 1912-2012

Yugograd

Skate City

America City

Reichstag 2020

Reichstag 1894

Deutsche Stadt

A seamless collage of satellite images of Germany's nine largest cities by population — Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt am Main, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Dortmund, and Stuttgart — stitched into a single continuous urban landscape. At first encounter it reads as one place; the collage only reveals itself on closer looking.

Elbphilharmonie 2019

Kaiserspeicher A 1875

Jungfernstieg 1890

Hamburg Hafen 1890

Berliner Schloss 2019

Berliner Schloss 1900

Powell Street 1895 v2

Kotbusser Tor 2018

Prenzlauer Tor 2018

Gorlitzer Tor 2018

Schonhauser Tor 2018

Frankfurtor Tor 2018

Landsberger Tor 2018

Anhalters Tor 2018

Potsdammer Tor 2018

Lombard Street . 1922 v2

Russian Hill 1875

Clay Street 1875

Telegraph Hill 1920

Rosenthaler Tor 1860

Oranienburger Tor . 1867

Schlesisches Tor 1910

Stralauer Tor 1902

Wasser Tor 1865

Hallesches Tor 1901

Charlottenburger Tor 1910

San Francisco City 1906

Uses the century-long gap between the source photograph and the painting to make a wider argument: that beauty and horror aren't opposites, only separated by time; that Lawrence himself was likely more captivated by the new aerial vantage point than by the disaster it happened to record; and, ultimately, a holistic view onto the human condition on this planet rather than a record of one city's tragedy.

Brandenburger Tor. 1899

A 1899 photograph of the Brandenburg Gate, looking west along the walkway, transferred onto canvas and painted with flat acrylic colour fields — the first painting in the Gates of Perception series, and the originating work of Bernard Bolter's Berlin practice.

Adolf Sutro . 1830-1898

Baker Beach . 1935

Two fishermen cast lines at Baker Beach as the Golden Gate Bridge rises unfinished behind them, San Francisco, 2016.

Cliff House . 1899

Emperor Norton . 1818 - 1880

Alcatraz . 1938

Golden Gate Bridge . 1935 v2

North Beach . 1856

Cliff House . 1901

Candlestick Park . 1956

Dennewitz Strasse 1905

Dennewitzstrasse . 1905

Spittlemarkt . 1909

Alexanderplatz . 1903

Hallesches Tor . 1894

Judah Street . 1903

Cliff House . 1902

To take a well-known, mass-produced, unauthored tourist photograph and run it through a deliberately personal, authored color process — testing the same warm/cool complementary color-balance principle (drawn originally from Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre, via Color Theory, 1995) against a subject far more iconic than the series' obscure founding image.

City Hall . 1906

Yerba Buena . 1936

Waterfront . 1950

Twin Peaks . 1882

Ferry Building . 1875

West Portal . 1920

Union Rally . 1861

Portsmouth Square . 1851

South Park . 1865

Lombard Street . 1922

Powell Street . 1895

Powell Street . 1895 v1

Market Street . 1906

Grant Street . 1906

Golden Gate Bridge . 1935

Telegraph Hill .1868

Cliff House . 1863

The first painting in the A Colorful History series. A t-shirt transfer of an 1863 photograph of the original Cliff House onto a 16 × 16 inch canvas, with flat acrylic colour fields in warm yellow, muted green, and soft blue-grey. Made in San Francisco in 2014, in response to conversations about how much the city had changed.

How to Euro Art School: Episode One

A four-minute video monologue in which Bernard Bolter recalls the 1998 preliminary entrance exam at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam — the act of making a painting to destroy it in the room as proof of readiness to start over.

MADRID spain

BANGKOK thailand

BEIJING china

MERIDA mexico

DENVER colorado

SALT LAKE CITY utah

MANHATTAN new york

San FRANCISCO california

ANTALYA turkey

MINNEAPOLIS minnesota

ISTANBUL turkey

GUANGZHOU china

SHENZHEN china

ZAGREB croatia

HAMBURG germany

RIGA latvia

COPENHAGEN denmark

BERLIN germany

PARIS france

MARSEILLE france

LISBON portugal

STOCKHOLM sweden

Venice Biennale 2007

The artist's later reflection on the piece: a figure on the inside trying to make sense of the inside, while yearning for the outside. Reflects real ambivalence about the high-art world at the time — engaged enough to build a whole composition around it, but never fully absorbed into it.

HONG KONG

Las VEGAS nevada

Los ANGELES california

VENICE italy

LONDON England

Skulptur Projekte Münster 2007

A transfer painting made at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie in 2007, combining multiple photographs from Skulptur Projekte Münster into a single landscape composition. The first work in Bolter's practice to layer multiple photo transfers on one canvas, bridging the Vanishing Landscapes series toward the conceptual ambition of what would become A Colorful History.

Ij Tunnel

Centraal Station Boats

Not consciously about the vanishing Dutch landscape at the time of making. The mountain graphic breaking out of the billboard frame was a private, half-ironic response to the flatness of the Dutch landscape after a lifetime around San Francisco's hills — homesickness disguised as advertising. The 'vanishing landscape' reading only became legible in hindsight, decades later.

Amsterdam Stock Market

BASEL switzerland

A seamless digital composite of Basel, Switzerland — the founding work of the Digital City Series. Four scenes captured on skateboard across the city's Altstadt are stitched into a single square composition, with the Rathaus and cathedral visible against an autumn palette. All hand-assembled in Photoshop, printed on aluminium at 48 × 48 inches.

Powell and California

Nob Hill

Kearny Street

Frisco Skyline

Cliff House 2006

Chestnut and Levenworth

Bay Bridge

New York CIty

Amsterdam

New York Stock Exchange

MET

Fort Mason

Coit Tower

Alemany Freeway

28th and Quintara

16th and RIvera

14th ave

8th and Kirkham

Holland Tunnel

Hanson Place

Grand Central Station

Fulton Triangle

Fulton and South Elliott

Fulton and Lafayette

Fort Greene Place

Ashland Place

Amsterdam . San Francisco . Brooklyn

South Elliott and Lafayette

Transfer painting of South Elliott and Lafayette Streets, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, fall 2004. Personal photograph on canvas via t-shirt transfer paper, with flat acrylic colour fields — painted sky above, buildings right, light post left. The corner's bulletproof bodega is long gone. A painting with a photo on it that doesn't exist anymore.

End

Inbetween

Height

Growth

Four Corners

To translate an outer-borough, infrastructural view of New York -- Queens warehouses with Manhattan reduced to a distant background presence -- into a painting that ultimately became a fully invented, hand-painted cosmology. The squares (sun, moon, Mars, star) were not planned as symbolic content from the outset; they arrived while painting, after the swatch device in Transition and the checkerboard in Four Nations had already been worked out, and the sacred-four color palette of the Native American Church (white, red, black, yellow) is echoed loosely rather than deliberately -- Mars-as-red the one conscious anchor, black relocated from a checkerboard-equal color to the entire field of the sky.

Four Nations

A photo-composite lower-Manhattan skyline -- Manhattan Bridge at left, an unidentified tower piercing a hand-painted sky at right -- fronted by an undulating, hand-painted checkerboard in white, red, black, and yellow across a rooftop parking lot. Third of the four original Art Collision compositions.

Transition

A photo-collaged composite Manhattan skyscraper framed by a hand-painted grey sky, flanked at its base by RGB and CMYK color swatches. Second of the four original Art Collision compositions, and the artist's first sustained use of photography in the work.

Hudson River

Towers

Prophecy

A digital print and acrylic collage on canvas depicting the New York skyline as a tree growing from the earth, with painted housing project pairs extending to the left — a visual translation of the Hopi prophecy, in which one figure grows and disappears. The first work in the Art Collision series, made in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 2002.

Cardboardman Visits Utrecht

A collaborative street performance made with Jur Jarring at the HKU Utrecht in 2000. Dressed in a homemade cardboard box suit, the two artists walked from the art school into the centre of Utrecht and back — documented in three black-and-white photographs showing the suit progressively falling apart.

Watercolor Sunset 4

Untitled Watercolor 6

Untitled Watercolor 5

Untitled Watercolor 3

Joe Clark

Joe's Window

Euro Train

Watercolor Sunset 3

Watercolor Sunset 2

Watercolor Sunset 1

Water Cross

Untitled Watercolor 4

Untitled Watercolor 2

Dutch Towers

Mokum Canal

Mauer Park

Living Room Trip

CHarles Bridge

The Globalist

Mokum Straat

A small pen drawing made on location in Amsterdam, circa 1997–98, during Bolter's first solo travels through Europe. Canal street scene with loose mark-making, one-line figures, and reinforced perspective lines — drawn from a canal bench, before any formal art training.

SFMOMA drawing

After Millet

Untitled Watercolor 1

Hill

House of Life

Education

What is the 'birth of civilization' if not everything.

Antiquity

An invented, ghost-white Acropolis beneath a Turner-inspired vortex of a sun, painted in a San Francisco backyard at the close of a self-taught period.

SFAI

Watercolour and pencil on paper, made on location on the roof of the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996. The view takes in the bay, Alcatraz at centre, and a rooftop easel at left — someone else's setup, pointing at the same scene.

Flowers

Stern Grove 8

Stern Grove 7

Stern Grove 6

Stern Grove 5

Stern Grove 4

Stern Grove 3

Stern Grove 2

Stern Grove 1

Trees

Self Portrait 1995

Fisheye self-portrait, oil on canvas, painted on the artist's 21st birthday from a hill in the SF backyard, with San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge (visible as a thin red structure) across the water.

Renoir Study

Nietzche's Dream

A statue of two stacked figures — red above, green below — stands on a cliffside plateau overlooking the Pacific, the upper figure pointing out past the edge beneath a Turner-like burning sky.

Intentions

Fiddler on a Roof

Color Theory

An imagined San Francisco landscape testing Goethe's warm/cool color theory for the first time, with the young artist himself reading beneath a tree.

Color Pyramid

Color Collumns

Canvas

ABstract

The End

A narrow panoramic oil painting of a figure walking along a lagoon-side walkway toward a guillotine, under a Turner-inspired sunset sky.

The Way to LA

The Sunset

A painting of the actual backyard view in the Sunset District of San Francisco where all the OG oil paintings were made — the vantage point itself, not an invented scene. Painted from underneath a bedroom that jutted out from the house, which offered shelter from the rain.

The Stage

Painted around the same time as Space Time (1993-94) as part of a short-lived figure-testing experiment not carried forward stylistically. Loosely informed by Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy — the Apollonian/Dionysian split — read around the time of painting. The artist frames the scene not as violence depicted but as something reenacted or performed on a stage: a formal containment of raw force, consistent with the Apollonian move of giving shape to the Dionysian. The direct Nietzsche reference recurs later in a separate work, Nietzsche's Dream.

Self Portrait 1994

A self portrait about the blurry line of existence.

Rite of Spring

Outside

Nature vs Nurture

Cross's

Corner

Color Vortex