Dr. Florian Messner has been residing of the UAE for the past 10 years. He is a member of Khalood Al Jabri’s Abu Dhabi Fine Arts Group.
Born in Austria, he is a graduate of the Teachers College where he received his art education and he is a graduate of both, the University of Vienna (PhD), and the University of Music and Dramatic Arts in Vienna (Performance Degree).
He has also conducted extensive fieldwork in the areas of ritual performance and various traditional singing styles in Bulgaria, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Mexico. He was assistant professor at Vienna University, senior lecturer at Deakin University, Australia, a guest professor at the Department for World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, USA, amongst the many other positions that he obtained.
As an artist, he has been inspired by many prominent artists of the Viennese School of “Fantastic Realism”, some of whom personally knew Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, Dr. Messner developed his own pictorial language. He describes the inspiration of his paintings as being from nature, intuition, and great works of art and their context from remote antiquity to the present. His paintings are both rich in colour and meaning.
As a painter, costume and stage designer, Dr. Messner had numerous solo and group exhibitions, workshops and productions in Vienna, Sydney, Moscow, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi. Dr. Messner also conducted ritual performance research in traditional cultures of Oceania, Indonesia and Mexico, he had been granted the privilege to live with people in remote areas and witness their cultures. He is also a cultural journalist.
