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Belgische kunstenaar Pol Mara, schilder, tekenaar en lithograaf

Mara Pol

Pol Mara, pseudonym for Louis Leysen, was a Belgian artist born in 1920 and died in 1998. He was a painter, lithographer and draftsman. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and at the National Higher Institute of Fine Arts. At the start of his career, he worked as a surrealist painter before moving on to lyrical abstraction in the 1950s. In 1958, he founded the Antwerp avant-garde group G-58 Hessenhuis with generational counterparts such as Paul Van Hoeydonck, Mark Verstockt, Filip Tas and Dan Vanseveren. He then drew and painted figures with round heads in a spotty world in which the spots eventually take over. In the 1960s, Pol Mara introduced photorealistic elements in his work, linking up with the emerging mass communication by interweaving elements from the world of television, film and illustrated magazines in his works. With that he ventured in the wake of Robert Rauschenberg on the pop art site. Pol Mara painted a dream world in which beautiful young women are found, often in light undergarments. His figures therefore display a kinship with the world of fashion magazines and advertising. He painted the portrait of Chanel model Patricia van Ryckeghem. With this pure, aesthetic world, Pol Mara wanted to protest against all the injustice and the ugly in our society.