Panta rhei - Everything flows
For two with Ursula & Bernard Schultze

“Everything Flows” is the title of a chapter in the catalog forthe 2023 internationally acclaimedretrospective *Ursula – That’s Me. So What? * at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Everything Flows—again, one might say, since the exhibition in Cologne follows a protracted, nearly three-decade-long period of institutional exhibition drought and the corresponding marginalization of Ursula’s (1921–1999) artistic oeuvre.

The artist shares this fate with many other women in the art world—but what is now also shared is a renewed flow, in recent years, of the reception of female, often historical, positions. The resulting—and long overdue—reintegration of important positions into the canon of art history resonates beyond the art world, into society at large, and is part of the current zeitgeist.

The phrase “Panta rhei” —Greek for “everything flows”— serves as the leitmotif of the two-person exhibition featuring Ursula and Bernard Schultze. As a specific interpretation, this phrase applies not only to Ursula’s works but is also closely linked to the work Bernard Schultze, who is Ursula’s husband, studio partner, and life partner.

Much like the intimate studio setting of the artist couple, the exhibition in the gallery’s attic aims to create a sense of coexistence and simultaneous closeness while, through the “Panta rhei” concept, allowing visitors to immerse themselves in the complex visual worlds of Ursula and Bernard Schultze.

Ursula
- Visual worlds of self-organized energy

"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 Metamorphoses it says: 'Everything flows, every appearance is formed alternately'".

Bernard Schultze
- Networking to form an organic unit

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."

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 changing, the growing, proliferating, and decaying—is 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.

On the surface, chaos may be closer to work , but Ursula’s pieces often remain anchored to a recognizable, albeit surreal, visual concept that rarely dissolves completely in their outward form. In essence, both works harmonize with the passage from Ovid’s *Metamorphoses* that is central to this exhibition:

Nothing remains in the same form, and loving change
Nature always creates new forms from others,
and in the vastness of the world nothing - believe me - is lost;
change and exchange is only in the form. Coming into being and becoming
only means beginning to be different than usual, and passing away
no longer being as before. Let this be moved here,
this perhaps there: on the whole, everything is constant.

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.” To add to this, the same can also be said of Bernard work .

Creative processes
‍-The artist no longer composes with a pre-planned result in mind, unlike the female artist

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 equally in a state of flux. For Schultze, this can be affirmed; Stephan Diedrich vividly describes his working process:

It all 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 out or break off, then starting anew and developing it in a different direction. In the process, he occasionally rotates the canvas, shifting the axes of direction—horizontal and vertical, top and bottom—thereby creating new pictorial situations as he paints. Step by step, complex interweavings emerge [...] that are at times reminiscent of branches in the air, and at other times of roots embedded in earthy matter or impenetrable thickets.

Schultze’s artistic approach in his creative process is clearly rooted in Informel, a movement he helped shape as a leading figure in 1950s Germany.

The artist Schultze no longer composes with a preplanned result in mind, in stark contrast to the artist Ursula:

“I hereby declare that everything in my work proceeds quite rationally,” says Ursula, and continues: “The image resides within the confines of my mind and waits to be released into the outside world, onto the canvas.”

Bernard Schultze, observing his wife: At the beginning, the wild, gestural lines outline grotesque figures. […] And then, as if in a reversal, that impatient, bent-over posture begins […]. With great perseverance, piece by piece is painted to completion, and in the end, everything comes together, interlocking with each other to form the ‘sacred surface,’ without any subsequent corrections. That is striking.

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, even watching her was a pleasure, for she exercised her skill with such grace.”

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.

For two
‍-With each other, against each other

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.