Panta rhei - Everything flows

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Exhibition concept:

Panta rhei - Everything flows
For two with Ursula and Bernhard Schultze

"Everything flows" is the title of a chapter in the catalog of the internationally acclaimed 2023 retrospective Ursula. That's me. So what?" at the Museum Ludwig in ^Cologne1. Everything flows - again, one must say, because the exhibition in Cologne follows a tough, almost three-decade-long phase of an institutional exhibition lull and corresponding marginalization of the artistic oeuvre of Ursula Schultze-Blum (1921-1999).

The artist shares this fate with many other women in art - but equally shared is a flow of reception of female, often historical positions that has resumed in recent years. The resulting reintegration of important positions into the canon of art history, which has long since lapsed, also resonates beyond the field of art, in society and is part of the current zeitgeist. "Cologne Museum Dives Into German Artist's Once-Lost Fantastical World" is even the headline of the New York ^Times2 in its prominent review of the exhibition, which underlines the importance of rediscovering "female worlds". Media and institutional tributes are important catalysts, as could also be seen recently in Bern, when the "Metamorphoses" of Heidi ^Bucher3, also designed as a retrospective, brought a breath of fresh air to the reception of the artist in the Bern Art Museum.

Bucher’s “Metamorphoses” serve as a key concept that bridges the transition to the central theme of this exhibition: the phrase “Panta rhei”—Greek for “everything flows.” The Latin translation (cuncta fluunt) appears in Book 15 of Ovid’s *Metamorphoses*, in the “Speech of Pythagoras,” where Ovid sets forth the natural philosophical foundation of his *Metamorphoses*. “Everything flows” was also a thematic focus of the Ursula Retrospective in Cologne, through which the work can be interpreted. For this exhibition, it is to become the central theme, as this specific interpretation is also closely linked to the work Bernard Schultze, who is Ursula’s husband, studio partner, and life partner. Similar to the intimate studio setting of the artist couple, the exhibition aims to create a situation of coexistence and simultaneous closeness, using the formula “Panta rhei” to facilitate an immersion into the complex visual worlds of Ursula and Bernard Schultze:

"Ursula's paintings are full of people and animals, plants and things that are in a state of transformation [...] In Ursula's pictorial worlds there is no distinction between animate and inanimate matter, rather it seems as if things are imbued with a self-organizing energy. This is based on a view of the world that also underlies Ovid's philosophy. In Ovid's Metamorphoses it says: 'Everything flows, every appearance is formed alternately'"⁴.

Bernard Schultze's paintings are characterized by a " [...] parallelism of artistic creative processes and natural processes of formation and decay. Like biomorphic formations, the gestalt-like formal inventions grow in the course of the painting process, are partly superimposed by other formations and network into an organic unity. "⁵

This self-organizing energy of things in Ursula’s work and Schultze’s formal explorations, which interconnect to form an organic unity, both follow the principle of *Panta rhei*. The flowing and constantly shifting, the growing, proliferating, and decaying are extremely present in both works. The sometimes microscopic detail of the design—often lacking any recognizable starting point or perspective—shifts in the next moment into a macrocosm of provoked chaos, only to then—as Schultze puts it—dissolve into a complex order. Chaos may, at first glance, be closer to work ; Ursula’s pieces, however, often remain anchored to a recognizable—albeit surreal—visual concept that rarely dissolves completely in their outward form. In essence, both bodies of work harmonize with the passage from Ovid’s *Metamorphoses* that is central to this exhibition:

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None remains in the same form, and loving change

Nature constantly creates new forms from other forms,

And in the vastness of the world, nothing - believe me - gets lost;

Change and exchange is only in the form. Emergence and becoming

Just means starting to be different than usual, and passing away

No longer be as before. Be transferred here to that,

This perhaps there: on the whole, everything is constant. ⁶

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Art historian Helena Kuhlmann aptly notes that “this famous speech, taken as a whole, is just as revealing of Ursula’s work as it seems to be relevant in our (modern) times^.”7 To add to this, the same can also be said of Bernard work .

With regard to the work Ursula and Bernard Schultze, the concept of “Panta rhei” implies not only aspects of content but also the question of the creative process, as one might assume that their working method is likewise in a state of flux. For Schultze, this can be affirmed; Stephan Diedrich vividly describes his working process: “It begins with the white canvas. Starting from one—and often several—points, Bernard Schultze feels his way into the pictorial space, pushing a color-form a certain distance before allowing it to branch off or break off, then starting anew and developing it in a different direction. In doing so, he occasionally rotates the canvas, shifts the axes of direction—horizontal and vertical, top and bottom—thereby creating new pictorial situations during the painting process. Step by step, complex interweavings emerge [...] sometimes reminiscent of branches in open space, at other times of roots embedded in earthy matter or impenetrable thickets^.”8  The artistic approach in Schultze’s creative process is clearly rooted in Informel, as the artist defined it in 1950s Germany as its leading figure. The artist no longer composes with a preplanned result in mind, in stark contrast to the female artist:

"I hereby declare that everything in my work is quite reasonable," says Ursula, and continues: "The picture sits in the shell of my head and waits to be released into the outside world, onto the canvas^{. "9} Bernard Schultze observes his wife: "The wild drawing gestures outline grotesque figures at the beginning. [...] And then, as if in a reversal, the impatient bending over begins [...]. Piece by piece is painted with great perseverance, and at the end everything fits together, interlocking to form a 'sacred surface', without any subsequent correction. That is astonishing "¹⁰.

Kuhlmann compares Schultze’s admiration to Ovid’s description of the “wondrous process of material metamorphosis” in the Lydian weaver Arachne, who was so gifted that people believed she must have been blessed by Athena: ‘Not only the finished fabrics, no, but even watching her was a pleasure; she exercised her skill with such grace’”11. A striking detail: Bernard Schultze gave Ursula the nickname “Spider” shortly after they met, and the artist often used it to sign her works. This anecdote is yet another example of how closely “Panta rhei” was interwoven into work shared life “as a couple” of Ursula and Bernard Schultze.

The closing remarks on an exhibition exploring the coexistence and interplay of two strong artistic positions—whose careers have nevertheless taken such different paths—should go to Manfred de la Motte, who described the (work) relationship between Ursula and Bernard Schultze in their artist’s book titled “zu zweit” as follows:

"Would you be proud if I proved exactly how little you owe to Ursula - or would you be happy if I made an analytical effort to do the exact opposite? That would be ludicrous and pointless - and both completely wrong. Let's leave it at "two": with each other, against each other, each the whetstone of the other, and any (in layman's terms) occasional similarities would then be purely coincidental, as in the movies, but not in life. "¹²

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Text: Patrick Urwyler

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Literature:

1. Ursula That's me. So what?, catalogue of the exhibition: Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 18.3 - 23.7.2023, edited by Stephan Diederich, Verlag Walter König 2023, pp.27-39.
2. New York Times, Cologne Museum Dives Into German Artist's Once-Lost Fantastical World, url: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/arts/design/museum-ludwig-ursula-exhibition.html
3. Heidi Bucher. Metamorphoses I, exhibition, Kunstmuseum Bern, 08.04.2022 - 07.08.2022, url: https://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch/see/today/1080-heidi-bucher-120.html.
4. Ursula That's me. So what?, catalogue of the exhibition: Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 18.3 - 23.7.2023, edited by Stephan Diederich, Verlag Walter König 2023, p.135.
5. Stephan Diederich, Unbegreifliches Leben der Wälder, in: Bernard Schultze. Welt im Farbrausch, catalogue of the exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, 2002, edited by Joseph Kiblitsky, Palace Editions 2002, p. 6.
6. Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses, 15th book (Pythagoras), in the translation by Johann Heinrich Voss (1798), from: projekt-gutenberg.org, url: https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/ovid/metamor/meta151.html
7. Helena Kuhlmann, 'fast wie eine innere Uhr' Die Metamorphose als ontologisches Prinzip in der Kunst Ursulas, in: Ursula Das bin ich. So what?, catalogue of the exhibition: Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 18.3 - 23.7.2023, edited by Stephan Diederich, Verlag Walter König 2023, p.34.
8. Stephan Diederich, Unbegreifliches Leben der Wälder, in: Bernard Schultze. Welt im Farbrausch, catalogue of the exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, 2002, edited by Joseph Kiblitsky, Palace Editions 2002, p. 7.
9. Kuhlmann 2023, p. 32
10. Kuhlmann 2023, p. 32
11. Kuhlmann 2023, p. 33
12. Manfred de la Motte, Foreword, in: Zu Zweit. Ursula. Bernard Schultze, artist's book, Edition B, 1993