Marek Herburt

Marek Herburt was born in 1954 in Lodz, Poland. Marek’s interest in painting began in the family home when he was about eight years old. His father, an architect, instructed and encouraged him. His first paintings were typical children’s art where subject was more important than form. When he was 15 years old Marek attended secondary Art School where he had a fascination with Polish and French Impressionists. Gradually Marek created fewer pictures of Baroque origin and his works started to have a pure and fresh appearance where more and more colours were adventurously compiled together. Bored with school regime at the age of seventeen, Marek undertook a sixteen-month journey around Poland working as a labourer with rural bricklayers. His desire for further education in the arts led him to the Academy of Art in Lodz in 1975. At this time, he was totally fascinated with light and its influence over colours and forms. In 1980, after his time at the Academy, Marek migrated to West Germany where he worked first as a painter and decorator, and later as a graphic designer. Since migrating to Australia in 1982 Marek has continued to explore the world around him in pictorial form. Through experimentation with watercolour Marek was primarily interested in very colourful abstracted landscapes. From 1984 he started work on large non-representational images, working mainly with acrylic on board. Over the years this work has remained his central artistic pursuit. In 1994 Marek returned to Poland for 12 months and started to work ‘plein air’, continuing to abstract the landscape but working with oil on smaller canvasses, spending time thinking deeply and about each application of colour. On his return to Australia in 1995 Marek completed a large body of representational religious narrative images using local people as models. Abstraction however was still strong and continues to be a recurring impetus to his creative life, sometimes with an emphasis on the symbolic meaning and harmony of geometry. With the increasing formalism of his work Marek deliberately uses a limited range of colours. Permeating his artistic pursuit is the ongoing fascination with light and the effect it has on colour and form. His work increasingly reflects an awareness of the Australian light on the environment. Here, colours are interacting with each other and the interactions in the spaces between forms are as important as the forms themselves. Charming in dynamic design and with a variety of colours depending on the time of the day or season, Mallee trees have become central themes in many of his paintings. Wandering throughout South Australia, Marek notices these trees are behind every corner, along stretched highways, in small streets and in undisturbed hiding spots around his house.