A Path through the Garden
where the Baltic Sea and the Achterwasser come close to each other, between the villages of Koserow and Zempin, already noticeable from afar by towering poplars and a low enclosure, marks the location of an estate. As you get closer, white walls shine through bushes and sprawling oaks, revealing a flat building with skylights. Lüttenort is the life and work place of the artist Otto Niemeyer-Holstein, who, as a distinctive designer, created a retreat that is unique in the northern region. Notable are the various openings in the garden—space and stage for sculptures by the artist’s friends:
Fritz Cremer, Waldemar Grzimek, Wieland Förster, Werner Stötzer, Jo Jastram, Sabine Teubner, Peter Kern, and Peter Makolies. The sculptures were either gifted or exchanged for paintings, and these diverse works blend naturally into the landscape of the garden. Often, the placement of the sculptures was discussed together, and Lüttenort became a large studio where not only sculptors and painters, but also befreinded musicians, actors, and writers would engage in conversation, discuss art, sail together, play music, and inspire each other.
Otto Niemeyer-Holstein:
“If I ever create a garden, I told myself, it should be like this, a combination of a cultural garden and a natural park... But it wasn’t just the plants and their arrangement that pleased me, but the possibility of bringing nature and art into a tense relationship, placing sculptures among trees, using walls to create structure, creating views, letting soft and hard play with each other.”
This interplay of sculpture and landscape fascinated him and remained an inspiration for the future. Later, it became almost imperative to “organize the necessary conditions for the work,” to create a varied garden that expresses the constant change in its rhythms and contributes to establishing the atmospheric conditions for the work.
Everything speaks of the playful-creative action of an artist, where nature arranges itself almost naturally, even the seemingly accidental becomes an orientation and, thus, a part of his life and an inexhaustible source for his artistic discoveries.
At Lüttenort, he lived his personal life concept, with earlier stations fitting into this context like building blocks. Through sculptures, found objects, proportions, and the creator's unique perspective on things, the property is multi-faceted, a hymn to all that is earthly, creative, and alive.
