Opening
Friday, April 4, 2003, 6 p.m.

Opening to be resided by Governor of the Province of Tyrol, DDr. Herwig van Staa
Words of welcome: Dr. Christoph Mader, Office of the Tyrolian Provincal Government, Department for Culture
Dr. Magdalena Hörmann, art historian, will speak about the exhibition

Paul Flora, who is one of today’s leading graphic artists began drawing in the late thirties. Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and above all Alfred Kubin were among those who influenced his work most. With his own trenchant abstract style and subtle humor, Flora has elaborated and done variations on themes such as the labyrinthine town, the military and theater, the “ingrained“ Tyrolean mindset, the crow and other living creatures.

Flora stresses the fact that he does drawings and not caricatures, even though between 1957 and 1971 he illustrated everyday politics in the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit with subtle irony. As a witness of his time Flora always alludes to the past, as Friedrich Dürrenmatt once noted: “In his oeuvre worlds have gone down and we can sense that we, too, are going down. The present seems to be in the clutches of the past and cannot free itself from them. It becomes the past itself and is swallowed by it. (...) Flora moves backward into the future.“

This dialectic between the present time and the past and the inherent melancholy are just as characteristic of Flora’s drawings as the “ingredient of the grotesque, abnormal, bizarre“ used to deliberately subvert beauty in art and to point a quill at boredom which, according to Flora, represents the only taboo in art. In her essay in the catalogue, Magdalena Hörmann comments not just on the mastery of Paul Flora’s drawings but also on his “intelligent wit“: “As a master of making light of things he accompanies negative processes with laconic texts, dedicates endearing portraits to murderers (...), carts off the bumptious king, banishing him into exile, and dubs Philistines sporting glasses revolutionaries.“

The exhibition will present a large cross-section of Flora’s drawings from the beginning of his career to the present. It was put together by the Kunsthistorisches Museum im Palais Harrach on the occasion of Paul Flora’s eightieth birthday in June 2002. It is now being shown at the Galerie im Taxispalais of which Flora was a co-founder as an advocate of modern and avant-garde art in 1964.

Paul Flora was born in Glurns (Südtirol) in 1922 and lives today in Innsbruck.

Talks with the artist
Thursday, April 24, 2003, 6 p.m.
Thursday, May 15, 2003, 6 p.m.