Pol Mara

Pol Mara 1920-1998

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. At the beginning of his career, he worked as a surrealist painter and then moved on to Lyrical Abstraction. In 1958, he co-founded the Antwerp avant-garde group G-58 Hessenhuis. 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”. In the 1960s, he developed a passion for pop art and introduced photorealistic elements into his work. With this pure, aesthetic world, Pol Mara wanted to protest against all the injustice and ugliness in our society.