Hann Ferenc: Paulovics. Kántor Lajos és Kocsis István írásaival (A PMMI kiadványai. Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága – Ferenczy Múzeum, Szentendre, 2008)

Hann Ferenc - The artist's career: an overview

(The years in Germany, 1985-1997) By 1983, the Ceau^escu regime turned Romania into an intolerable desert in intellectual and economic terms. The indescribable conditions upset even the uneducated population. Intellectuals got imprisoned in cells without bars. The Saxons, who represented an integrant part of Transylvanian culture, were 'sold'to Germany, and the word bozgor (homeless, stateless) became a verbal offense of everyday use against Hungarians in Transylvania and in the Partium region. In 1985, the many-sided artist, generally esteemed and well received even by Romanian art critics, made the hard decision of leaving his homeland. After an adventurous and nerve-racking journey and a struggle against the 'insolence of office', he arrived to Bavaria, in Germany. Later on he found Iserlohn, a small town in South Westphalia, which, with its 100,000 inhabitants, was small only by German standards. His family followed him soon. A few k lometers away from Iserlohn, in Barendorf, he found a spacious studio. His situation was ambiguous. On the one hand, he was free at last in every respect, and no one would withdraw his passport, as it often happened in Romania; but on the other hand, he lived in a foreign country far away from home. An artist thinking from inside to the outside, Paulovics did not imitate any fashionable style in Germany. Yet, some aspects of his art were gradually changing as his painting was shifting towards lyrical abstraction and gesture painting. It is important to stress that this change did not take place radically though it