vita
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The artist was born in a small medieval town in Franconia/Germany and grew up between lakes, mea-dows and forests, shaped by nature and an early musical and artistic education at home. As a child Me-nu already loves painting and her pictures were unusual for her age. After graduating from high school, she began to study dramatics, psychology and speech at Munich and successfully completed acting stu-dies. Then she worked for ten years as an actress in professionell engagements on theatre, radio and television and as dubbing actor. Further on the artist put her professional focus on the writing of scripts, novels, children's books, poetry and non-fiction books.
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After the birth of her son, she and her family moved from Munich back to the countryside. There she founded a publishing house with her husband and reached the peak of her literary activity. The exces-sive demands on her strength during this time resulted in a burnout and put an end to her previous pro-fessional activities. The resurrection of her power granted the artist access to the fascinating world of painting. Thereby she discovered a new source of inspiration and creativity. She says: “Painting fetched me out of my collapse. My soul has healed itself with painting and opened up a new creative path for me."
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This way began after attending an independent art school at Nuremberg. In addition, she learned and expanded her professional craft as a painter from well-respected artists and instructors on the Nurem-berg art scene. Today she works as a freelance artist. She is represented in exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland and the USA.
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​​menu's art - a consideration
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What is transcendence? What is behind the outer world of phenomena, the boundary to the visible world? What is beyond the finiteness of the world that can be sensed? What is the essence of things? Who or what are we? What means “I”, what “self”?
Once the famous artist Max Beckmann said: “All essential things in art [have] always emerged from the deepest feeling for the mystery of being ... Art conduces to knowledge, not to entertainment, romantici-sation or play. The search for our own self is the eternal, never to be ignored path that we have to go."
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Menu's paintings cross the border and open spaces and perspectives beyond the world of experience of normal sensory perception, they refer to the spiritual dimension behind what can be grasped by the sen-sations and - in the search for one's own self - unsheathe what is hidden behind the immediate assump-tion.
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It is not about vague dreams or mystical things, but about visualizing this spiritual, “invisible” dimension behind the concrete experience of a sensation, an emotion, a memory, a thought or an event. To visua-lize the spiritual essence of “reality” with color, shape, technique and composition - or, in the words of a famous Kabbalist: “If you want to grasp the invisible, penetrate as deeply as you can into the visible "- this is an artistic act of "translating" the transcendence into the so-called real world of experience. This translation is an intermediation of a deeper reality, which also holds the power of transformation - with a view to the perception of prosaicness - to the knowledge of the ultimately transcendent origin of all consciousness.
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Menu Werdin's transcendent art is thus a deeply humane art, it spotlights the humanness, creates spa-ces of consciousness in mindfulness and silence, lets the soul breathe again, which in all the loud out-wardnesses of our world full of entertainment, consumption, distraction, garrulity and superficiality threatens to suffocate.
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And this should be the highest task of art today.
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Günther Reiter-Werdin, Gallery LiterariconArt
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