Pol Mara started his education in 1935 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. From 1941 to 1948 he continued his education at the National Higher Institute for Fine Arts. He subsequently became a graphic designer at Janssen Pharmaceutica.
At the beginning of his career, he worked as a surrealist painter and then moved on to Lyrical Abstraction. In 1958, he set up the Antwerp avant-garde group G-58 Hessenhuis with fellow artists such as Paul Van Hoeydonck, Filip Tas and Dan Van Severen.
Critic Marc Callewaert wrote about his informal artworks: “Stubborn grandeur, in which Flemish Expressionism finds a new incarnation, is answered by the lyrical movement that in the recent work of Pol Mara, in an eruptive color rush, radiant and baroque revolving, has come loose. In daring, sometimes poisonous, always intensely living contrasts, this painter more and more appeals as an amazing colorist. However, there is no question of any uncontrolled gesture. The ‘gesto’ is disciplined, the emotion is led in deliberate pictorial jobs”, (Marc Callewaert, ‘Second Group Exhibition G-58, Expansion and deepening’, in: Gazet van Antwerpen, 24 November 1959) .
