How to spot a Matemera fake: a direct comparison

One of the most powerful tools in authentication is the process photograph — an image taken during the creation of a work, showing the artist’s hand in direct contact with the stone. When such photographs exist, they transform provenance from an abstract claim into a visible, verifiable fact.
This post presents exactly that: a side-by-side comparison of an authentic Bernard Matemera sculpture with a fake of the same composition, anchored by a remarkable set of photographs documenting Matemera creating the original work during a workshop residency in Cadier en Keer, the Netherlands, in 1998.

The Composition: Bird-Mother
The subject is one of Matemera’s signature forms — a bird-human hybrid in a hunched, self-contained posture, the great curving beak sweeping downward toward the body, the form revealing itself as female — two breasts clearly articulated beneath the beak. The composition is closed and self-contained, simultaneously powerful and tender. It is unmistakably Matemera: no other sculptor of the Tengenenge tradition worked this particular territory of the human-animal boundary with quite the same emotional directness.

The Workshop Photographs: Cadier en Keer, 1998





The photographs shown here were taken during a workshop residency in Cadier en Keer, in the Dutch province of Limburg, in 1998. They document Matemera working the stone from rough block through to the emerging form, and represent an unusually complete record of his creative process.

In the early photographs, he works at ground level on the raw stone — the informal, concentrated posture typical of a sculptor feeling his way into a stone. In the close-up image, the unfinished head is already fully legible: the eye socket is established, the beak line is being resolved, and the relationship between head and body is taking shape. The subsequent photographs show the piece at a more advanced stage, with Matemera seated and standing at the work, refining the form with his tools.

His knitted cap is visible throughout — a small but consistent detail that ties the photographic sequence together and confirms these images document a single artist working a single piece across a single residency.

The stone being worked in these photographs is dense black springstone. This matters.

The Authentic Piece



The finished work — documented in auction — is carved in high-quality black springstone, with the wax layer faded due to age. The execution is exceptional throughout: the beak has a sweeping, confident curve that speaks of a sculptor who understood the form from the inside; the eye has proper sculptural depth with clean undercutting; the fingers are articulated with skill and economy. The overall composition is tightly resolved — the interlocking of beak, arms and body creating the spatial tension that is the hallmark of Matemera’s mature work.

The Fake



The fake follows the same compositional template closely enough to be recognisable as a copy. But the differences are immediate and cumulative.

The stone is a warm reddish-brown — most likely a lower-grade material — rather than the dense black springstone Matemera used. This alone is a significant red flag: stone choice was not incidental to Matemera’s practice but central to his aesthetic. A sculptor working from photographs rather than from understanding of the original will reach for whatever stone is available or affordable.

The surface finish is coarse. Tooling marks are visible where the finished original shows smooth transitions. The beak is perhaps the most immediately readable difference: in the original it follows an organic, flowing curve; in the fake it is rendered as a straight line, losing entirely the tension and elegance of Matemera’s form. The eye is a simple raised oval with minimal depth. The breasts, clearly defined in the original, are here roughly blocked out and unconvincing. The proportions feel slightly "off" - the head is too large relative to the body mass.
Most tellingly, the faker has added an ear — a detail absent from the original. Rather than enriching the composition, it crowds it, throwing off the careful balance Matemera achieved. It is precisely the kind of addition that reveals a copyist who did not understand why the original looks the way it does — only what it approximately looks like. The overall sense is of someone who has grasped the general arrangement of the composition but cannot resolve its three-dimensional logic, because that logic was never learned from the stone itself, only inferred from a photograph.
What the Comparison Demonstrates
Placed together, these two pieces offer a case study in what authentication evidence actually looks like in practice.

The workshop photographs establish, beyond reasonable doubt, that the authentic piece was made by Matemera in The Netherlands in 1998. They show the stone type, the scale, the working method, and the artist himself. The finished piece is consistent with all of these in every material and formal respect.

The fake shares a composition but nothing else. Different stone, different finish, different quality of execution, different understanding of the form. It is the product of someone who has looked at a photograph of Matemera’s work and attempted to reproduce what they saw — with the inevitable result that everything which cannot be seen in a photograph is wrong.

A Note on the Broader Market
Matemera died in 2002. His work commands significant prices at auction and in the secondary market. The combination of high demand, distinctive and reproducible compositions, and a deceased artist who cannot authenticate works in person makes him an obvious target for forgers.

The composition shown here — the Bird-Mother — is not the only Matemera subject being copied. Buyers encountering works attributed to Matemera should ask, at minimum: What is the stone type? What is the quality of the polish? Is there documentary evidence connecting the piece to the artist? And who previously owned it?

Workshop photographs of the kind shown here are rare. But they are not the only form of evidence that matters. Stone type, surface quality, formal resolution, and documented provenance all contribute to a picture that skilled fakers cannot fully replicate — because they are copying the appearance of a work made by someone who understood stone, not the understanding itself.

The photographs shown in this post document Bernard Matemera working at a residency in Cadier en Keer, Netherlands, in 1998. The authentic piece was subsequently offered at auction. The fake was encountered in the current market.
This post was written with the help of Claude AI.