Olaf Hajek: Cover Artist-The Great Book of Artmakers 2025 Edition
The Great Book of Artmakers 2025 Edition is a beautifully designed collector’s book that brings together the voices, ideas, and artworks of 100 artists from around the world. Each page feels like stepping into an artist’s studio hearing the quiet sound of brushes, feeling the energy of creation, and witnessing the moment when imagination takes form.
Wrapped in a gold-foiled jacket and featuring cover art by the extraordinary Olaf Hajek, this edition is more than a book it’s a celebration of creativity, courage, and the human desire to make something meaningful.
Born from the International Artist Award, this first edition gathers artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, digital media, and more. Together, they form a diverse and inspiring community each artist unique, yet connected by the same passion for art.
The Great Book of Artmakers is not only about showcasing art it’s about telling stories. Stories of persistence and wonder, of transformation and hope. Stories that remind us why art has always mattered because it connects us across time, cultures, and languages, saying quietly, “I understand. I feel this too.”.
Olaf Hajek- The Vision Behind the Cover
Internationally known and instantly recognizable, Olaf Hajek brings to life the visual poetry of dreams. His cover for the 2025 Edition captures the essence of the book bold, intricate, and deeply imaginative. Famous for his vibrant colours and storytelling style, Olaf’s work lives where folklore meets fine art, and where imagination feels both timeless and alive. From his Berlin studio to exhibitions around the world, his artistic journey has been one of curiosity and growth.
He studied graphic design in Düsseldorf before building a career that moved far beyond illustration. Today, his art connects tradition with modern expression, blending cultural stories, spirituality, and emotion into visual worlds that feel at once personal and universal.
Who is Olaf Hajek?
Born in 1965 in Rendsburg, Germany, Olaf Hajek has become one of the most celebrated illustrators and painters of his time. From an early age, he was drawn to pictures that could tell stories without using words.
After studying Graphic Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf, he began his creative journey in Amsterdam, where he worked as a freelance artist and developed his distinctive visual language.
Now based in Berlin, Olaf’s art has reached audiences around the world through exhibitions and features in publications like The New York Times, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone. Yet beyond his success, what defines his work is its emotional depth. Every painting feels like a story a mix of memory, myth, and magic, told in colors that seem to breathe with life.
Education and Background
Olaf’s background in graphic design gave him strong technical skills, but his love of storytelling quickly led him into new creative territory. After moving to Amsterdam, he started freelancing and worked with major brands like Bacardi, Montblanc, and Mini.
Even while working commercially, Olaf kept his fine art deeply personal expressive, spiritual, and free. Over time, he created a space that’s entirely his own, one that bridges commercial art and emotional exploration.
His paintings often blur the lines between cultures, styles, and realities. Influenced by folklore, spirituality, and the imperfect beauty of life, Olaf’s art reminds us that creativity isn’t just about how something looks it’s about what it makes us feel, tings you can see it in the storytelling quality of her work, in the way her figures seem to belong to both real life and a quiet dream.
Artistic Style and Themes
To see an Olaf Hajek painting is to step into a dream rich, textured, and full of meaning. His work draws from folk art, surrealism, and magical realism, creating worlds that feel both familiar and otherworldly.
You might see a figure surrounded by flowers, patterns, and wildlife every detail telling its own story. His art often explores the connection between people and nature faces that merge with plants, animals that seem to speak, landscapes that feel alive.
Olaf takes inspiration from many cultural traditions African, Indian, and South American as well as mythology and the natural world. His use of symbolism creates a quiet dialogue about how human emotions and nature reflect one another.
What makes his art truly moving is its honesty. It doesn’t demand attention — it invites it. His paintings encourage us to pause, feel, and remember that life’s beauty often exists within its complexity between joy and loss, change and renewal.
Creative Process of Olaf Hajek
Olaf’s creative process is as intuitive as his art. He often starts with a simple feeling or memory and lets it grow naturally. Working mostly with acrylics on wood or cardboard, he builds each painting in layers, allowing colours and textures to evolve and surprise him.
His Berlin studio is filled with sketches, books, and objects collected from his travels a space where inspiration never stops. For Olaf, painting is both meditation and discovery. “I like when a painting surprises me,” he says. “
When something unexpected appears that’s when it feels alive
Each piece becomes a dialogue between artist and canvas, between feeling and form. This thoughtful process gives his art its unmistakable depth and emotional presence.
Exhibitions
Over the years, Olaf Hajek’s work has been exhibited in galleries across the globe — from Berlin and Hamburg to Cape Town and Atlanta. Each show offers a glimpse into a new chapter of his creative journey.
Selected Solo Exhibitions:
- Paradiese, Museum Haus Löwenberg, Gengenbach (2023)
- Trost, Anna Jill Lüpertz Gallery, Salzburg, Austria (2023)
- El Jardín del Explorador, Gallery Kaplan Projects, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (2021)
- Natura Morte, Anna Jill Lüpertz Gallery, Berlin (2021)
- Secret Garden, Zurich (2019)
- Travel the World and the Seven Seas, Potsdam (2019)
- New Paintings, Whatiftheworld Gallery, Johannesburg (2018)
- Flowerhead, Direktorenhaus, Berlin (2010)
- Masquerade, Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, USA (2010)
Selected Group Exhibitions:
- The Logic of Error, Migrant Bird Space, Berlin (2023)
- The Annual Group Show, Galleri Christoffer Egelung, Copenhagen (2022)
- Dark Patterns II, Feinkunst Krüger, Hamburg (2020)
- Inspired by the 18th Century, Kasteel d’Ursel, Belgium (2015)
- Illustrative 07, Paris & Berlin (2007)
Each exhibition adds a new dimension to his story an artist continually exploring how colour, culture, and imagination can meet in unexpected ways many group exhibitions across Europe and Asia, each one reaffirming her place as an artist who connects deeply with audiences. Whether in Seoul or London, viewers often describe her shows as experiences of peace an escape into colour, feeling, and reflection.
Awards and Recognition
Olaf Hajek’s art has touched audiences and critics around the world, earning him honours from the Art Directors Club and the New York Society of Illustrators, among others.
Yet beyond awards, what truly defines his impact is how people connect with his art. Whether seen in a gallery or on a printed page, his paintings evoke emotion wonder, nostalgia, or quiet reflection. His work reminds us that beauty is not only what we see, but what we feel long after looking. contemporary and traditional art circles.
What Lies Ahead for Olaf Hajek?
Olaf Hajek continues to inspire both artists and admirers across the world. His work has a way of reaching beyond what we see, diving deeper into themes of myth, spirituality, and the natural world. Every painting feels like an invitation to slow down and look closer to notice how imagination and emotion can exist in perfect balance. Olaf’s art carries a quiet strength; it doesn’t just capture what’s beautiful, it uncovers the stories and feelings behind it.
Through colour, texture, and symbolism, he explores the invisible connections that tie people to nature, and dreams to reality. His figures seem alive with thought, his flowers bloom with emotion, and his patterns whisper of places both real and imagined. Each piece becomes a reflection of the world full of meaning, movement, and mystery.
What makes Olaf’s work truly remarkable is how it reminds us to see with more than our eyes. He asks us to look beyond the surface, to find beauty in complexity, and to rediscover wonder in the small and ordinary moments of life. His paintings are not just images; they’re experiences living stories that encourage us to pause, feel, and remember how creativity connects us all.
The Great Book of Artmakers – 2025 Edition is more than a publication it’s a tribute to the act of creating. With Olaf Hajek’s stunning artwork on its cover, it becomes a symbol of what art stands for: connection, courage, and the beauty of expression.
Every artist featured in this book adds another heartbeat to the global story of creativity. This isn’t just a book to display it’s one to return to, to draw inspiration from, and to celebrate.
Inside its pages, you’ll find not only remarkable art, but a shared truth: creativity, in all its forms, is what keeps us human.
