Modern Art - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 2010 - 55 Euro Cent

"ANNUAL RINGS OF FRAGRANCE AND LUCK" With this special stamp the popular series "Modern Art in Austria" finds its colorful continuation. The motif of the new value shows a painting by Helmut Kand, a poetic surrealist or, as the "Münchner Abendzeitung" once wrote, "plausible maker of the impossible". About the person: Prof. Helmut Kand, who grew up in Styria "in an art-loving house", studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Albert Paris Gütersloh and Rudolf Hausner. At the age of 19, he undertook a long pilgrimage, his destination was the great Spanish painter and eccentric, Salvador Dali. Guest studies in Florence, Rome and London as well as numerous exhibitions in Europe, Australia, USA, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Argentina made the artist known internationally at an early age. His works - paintings and sculptures - can be found in well-known galleries and museums around the world. In addition, the "traveler in the matter of imagination", as he likes to call himself, created the most diverse projects for public space. The award-winning painter bears the rare title of "Foreign Born Indonesian Artist" and is the official "painting ambassador" of the Greek island of Ios. In that sleeping paradise he spent forty long summers and painted with poetic-surreal narrative force themes of boundless joie de vivre: anticipated, desired, experienced, visions and joy, eroticism and half-finished daydreams. His annual rhythm is such that he does not long for where he is, but that he is always there. "When I start a picture," says Kand, "I do not have a clear idea of ​​it. The beginning is always a heated act in which I drive with a sponge in a large arc over the surface. The white canvas is a challenge that can only be met with cheeky courage. "The results, of course, are of a spectral variety of cosmic dimension, they lead the observer into an exuberant range of ideas - full of erotic aesthetics and abstract riddles. All elements are intertwined, a flowing communication of flowing force; it blazes, it lightens, it follows a microcosmic order. The dogmas of his pictures speak of secret longing, fantastic love, deeply felt pleasure and orgasmic flowing - they show everything, intoxicatingly open, but always mysteriously encrypted and poetically intimate. "Countless attempts have been made to give a title to the painter Helmut Kand:" Visual Alchemist "was once in a review of the magazine" Wiener. "The French" Le Monde "certainly brought Professor Kands passionate-artistic work with lyrically terse words in a nutshell: "To paint like him, you have to jump over island mountains, have suns prancing, moons and cats caressed."