Marek Haiduk

Intermediate worlds

Designer and illustrator Marek Haiduk is from Romania, immigrated to Germany in 1989 with his parents, and now calls Vienna home.

As though these earlier biographical schisms between different societal systems awoke in him the desire to divide and connect, he has developed in his illustrations a penchant for graphically sharp, diagonally and vertically constructed collages. The main characters are not drawn figures but rather black-and-white people he clips from the media and commercial photography of the 1950s and 1960s. They live in an environment of fragmentary details borrowed from post-war and baby-boomer-era architecture, technology, and interior design.

No clothes or surfaces in complicated prints, but rather clear forms and hard-edged outlines, straight-line silhouettes, and reduced background surfaces in magenta, ochre, and turquoise accentuate his freelance works in particular.

Landscape is a work from three points of view in which a mountain landscape cut out in Haiduk’s typical zigzag manner is elongated graphically. Details such as metal spools, the head of a razor, and screws inserted into the scene become abstract architectural elements in front of the mountains’ silhouette. The couple sitting on the horse crossing the image looks as though they’ve stepped out of a western as the search along the exactly drawn line for their way.

His drawings most resemble a time machine that cleverly rewinds and fast-forwards through putative information and bygone aesthetic ideals in order to sort them anew and rearrange them. Haiduk always allows for empty space in the image in order to allow room for free association as well as to expose his illustrations as visual simulations.

Christina Wendenburg