Strange Flowers - Olaf Hajek (paintings)

Hajek is a painter immersed in a world of surreal fantasy and melancholic beauty. Drawing from diverse references such as 60’s African studio photography, renaissance perspective and the Dutch still lifes of the 1600s his work is underpinned by the colour and texture of folkloric imagery.Strange Flowers, Hajek’s most recent body of work, is a hypnotic tangle of botanical forms and colour. Rendered in acrylic on wood panels, Hajek uses distressed and exquisitely fine mark-making to create a rich surface patina. Woven into the fabric of the work the image of the flower is used as a seductive yet contradictory metaphor for fertility, poison, growth and decay.

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