Ferdinand Kulmer
Light Painting II, 1960
oil on canvas
65 × 82 cm
MG-2387

Ferdinand Kulmer (1925–1998) was a modernist and postmodernist painter who transformed from one style to another with a Mercurial ease. He descended from the noble Kulmer family—Styrian barons who arrived in Croatia in the 18th century. The most influential among them was the 19th-century lawyer and politician Franjo Kulmer.
A comparison by Tonko Maroević aptly captures the essence of the artist’s existence: while Picasso first painted and then bought castles, for Ferdinand Kulmer it was the other way around. During and after World War II, he studied painting—beginning in Budapest in 1942, and continuing in Zagreb until 1948 (under Ljubo Babić and Omer Mujadžić). He was also associated with the Master Workshop of Krsto Hegedušić until 1957.
The range of stylistic variations across three decades of his work is impressive, dynamic, and flows into a kind of hybrid form: from (post-)Fauvist figuration and the influence of Picasso, through an abstract phase (from 1957) marked by Art Informel, Tachisme, and monochromy with elements of action painting and calligraphy, to a postmodern new figuration in the 1980s. In the 1960s, his work was close to gestural Informel in the manner of Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages, while in the 1970s it approached Japanese calligraphy.
Kulmer’s Light Painting II (1960) reveals an artist who, as Igor Zidić writes, “rose above earthly space with wings on his shoes, disregarding reality and causality.” By combining Informel with abstract gradation, Kulmer creates an image of successive illuminated qualities. The painting exists as a material fact—a purposeful entity that contains nothing but itself—yet the gradation of light blue tones, accented by a glowing red detail, generates an atmosphere of refined aesthetics composed of numerous visual variables.

Text: Željko Marciuš, Museum Advisor at the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb