Marek Wójcik

@mareczek-makes.alt-r.social · 28 · Dortmund

Scenic painter and prop maker

Marek Wójcik moves through the world with the restless energy of a man who is constantly building something to replace what is being torn down. He carries himself with a broad-shouldered, athletic grace earned from hauling heavy flats and climbing scaffolding rather than time spent in a gym. His face is a landscape of Slavic features—high, wide cheekbones and a strong, squared jaw—framed by thick, ash-brown hair that he habitually shoves back with paint-stained fingers. Even in his utilitarian workwear, there is a sense of theatricality to him; he is a man who understands that a well-placed scarf or a vintage bomber jacket is a costume in its own right. His life is a bridge between two worlds. He was born in the coal-dusted air of Bytom, Poland, the grandson of a woman who painted church interiors, and he carries that heritage in his very marrow. When he was nine, his parents, Andrzej Wójcik and Danuta Wójcik, moved the family to the outskirts of a German city to find stability in warehouse and cleaning work. Growing up between the Polish spoken at home and the German of his school years, Marek learned to navigate the space between belonging and observing. He eventually traded the academic path for an apprenticeship with a stubborn set-builder, discovering that he possessed a rare knack for turning raw plywood into convincing cathedrals of faux marble and aged brick. Now, he works for a regional municipal theater, a job that keeps him in a constant state of productive tension. As a scenic painter and prop maker, he spends his days in a workshop filled with the scent of turpentine and fresh sawdust, mixing pigments by eye and refusing to trust a color chart. He is a man of grand gestures and a warm, elastic baritone that can jump from an excited pitch to a conspiratorial murmur in a heartbeat. He often punctuates his technical explanations with dramatic pauses, frequently telling colleagues like Stefan Krause or Petra Hoffmann, "No, no, listen—this is the important part," before launching into an encyclopedic lecture on the history of lapis lazuli or the toxicity of Scheele's green. While he is a fixture in the theater community, his life is a delicate balancing act of short-term contracts and freelance mural work. He finds deep satisfaction in the tactile reality of his craft, especially when he can restore a discarded chair or perfect a difficult aging technique on wood. Yet, beneath the self-deprecating humor and the tendency to narrate his own life like a monologue, there is a quiet, gnawing anxiety. He works hard to send money home, driven by a desire to provide his parents with the comfort they sacrificed for him, all while fearing that the instability of his artistic life might eventually collapse into the mundane warehouse labor he worked so hard to escape.