Speech at the opening of the exhibition by Ute Meyer on 10.4.2024 in the gallery on the island in Thalfingen
Dear ladies and gentlemen,
Welcome to the opening of an exhibition by Ute Meyer from Flensburg, whereby this is already her 3rd exhibition in this gallery.
As you enter this gallery, you find yourself in the middle of a “Garden of God” or, at least for atheists or agnostics, in a Garden of Eden, which was created through the interaction of nature and the creative contribution of man.
The beauty of the gardens offered man the opportunity to separate nature from its adversities and isolate it as something “beautiful”.
Basically, abstraction took place here for the first time, in the sense of abstrahere, from the Latin for to leave out.
All of nature’s adversity does not take place, just as music emerged from the tubular bones found and the lion became man and man presented himself as a lion – this is how it allowed man to deal with danger.
Nature gives us plants and flowers – and what does our mind do?
It arranges them! Don’t say that the arrangement of a flower picture comes from feeling, it comes from the mind, because that is where the knowledge of the “golden ratio”, for example, is located, where the effect of the color contrasts is stored, whereby feeling becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes feeling.
From the Stone Age tubular bone with eight holes that helped to create music – we now return to Ute Meyer’s realistic flower still life.

Isn’t that a huge leap?
No, to cut a long story short, it’s a way of encircling the often experienced contrast between abstract and figurative art.
For a long time, figurative art was considered to be virtually finished, obsolete, and suddenly in 1974 and now in 2024, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is breaking audience records with figurative art.
What drives people, to put it disrespectfully, the masses to the son of a Greifswald candlemaker, a pantheistic oddball and a great painter who certainly didn’t paint nature as he found it, but rather elevated it and declared it pantheistic in the face of the approaching industrial revolution?
But this is not about CDF, it is about Ute Meyer!
Her artistic understanding can also be deduced and explained, if you like. Why, because it makes the joy of her paintings even more manifest.
It is an everlasting beauty that we can experience in and through nature. The strokes of color as flower stems entwine in wonderfully calculated escapades and a single poppy then draws the eye like a traffic light.
Much of the form and color that we often appreciate in isolation in so-called non-objective art is easily accessible in Ute Meyer’s work in the combination of emotional, analytical and calculated experience of nature.

Manfred Bittner