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

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