The artist Willy Meyer-Osburg, born in Bremen in 1934, lived in Worpswede from 1957 to 1960 and from 1997 until his death in 2005. Many major museums have acquired his works, such as the Städtisches Museum Wuppertal, the Brooklyn Museum New York, the Landesmuseum Bonn, the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren, the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund, the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and even corporate collections such as that of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt.

Lothar Romain wrote to the artist in 1988: For me, your work is a particularly important example of the fact that representational painting is not only still of importance in art history, but also remains meaningful in our days. For a long time now, you have found a place of your own for this painting, equally far removed from realism as from abstraction: a borderland in which the objects literally become transparent. They live a painterly existence, placed in a multi-layered space where they are often enigmatically connected to each other.