Academic painter Ferdinand Kulmer studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest 1942 - 1945 (Rezsö Burghardt) and in Zagreb 1945 - 1948 in the class of Omer Mujadžić and Đuro Tiljak, where he graduated. He then took a special painting course with Đuro Tiljak until 1950 and was an associate of Krsto Hegedušić's Master Workshop from 1950 to 1957. From 1961 until his retirement in 1990, he worked at the Academy of Fine Arts (since 1975 as a full professor). Member of the group "Mart" since 1957, Gallery "Forum" since 1969, and since 1980 a member of HAZU.

After the initial phase of stylized figuration, close to Fauvism, the abstract period begins with the painting Admiral (1957, MSU); at first he experimented with tachist techniques, then he created monochrome, material-rich compositions close to informal with thick relief layers of paint and rich textures, and soon turned to expressionist abstraction. In the next period, he creates calligraphies of a meditative atmosphere in oil, ink and acrylic. Soon he finds his own "language" and covers the canvas with living calligraphic characters. In his paintings, signs and lines of calligraphic printing prevail, and the surfaces become scenes of open color contrasts and lively pictorial arabesques. He developed the expression to its peak in the so-called zigzag phase, in which, mostly in acrylic, he flooded the compositions, often with characters that would "emerge" to the surface, with distinctive signs of vivid color. Returning among the first to figurative painting, he announced a new era of painting. With narrative, expressive cycles with mythological and heraldic themes, he followed up on the current postmodernist stylization at the time.