“My aim is to create on canvas, a perfect balance and harmony of colour and form reflecting the natural and human created world”

Marek Herbert trained at the Academy of Art in his home city of Lodz, Poland in the mid 1970’s. His initial artistic pursuits saw him fascinated with the influence of light on colour and form.

Since migrating to Australia in 1982, Herburt has continued to explore in pictorial form the world around him. Through experimentation with watercolour he was initially interested in very colourful abstracted landscapes. From 1984 Herburt 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 Herburt returned to Poland for 12 months and started to work “plein air”, still abstracting the landscape but working with oil on smaller canvasses. He painted very quickly, but spent time thinking deeply before and about each application of colour.

On his return to Australia Herburt completed a large body of representational religious narrative images using people around him as models. Abstraction however was still strong and is a recurring impetus to his creative life. Since 2000 Herburt has returned increasingly to abstraction, with an emphasis on the symbolic meaning and harmony of geometry. With the increasing formalism of his work, Herburt is also using deliberately limited range of colours.

Permeating his artistic pursuit, Marek Herburt has a continuing fascination with light and its effect on colour and forms. His work more and more reflects an Australian sensibility of the effect on light on the environment where the colours are bleached and where what happens in the spaces between forms is as important as the forms themselves.