In the seventies, when Rudolf Horacek was asked multiple times to draw a person, the image usually remained limited to a head. Only very rarely did he draw an entire body, but heads had caught his interest. He began them with an egg-shaped circle, which he slowly filled up with lines, numbers, letters, or short phrases (mostly “Horacek in Mannswörth”). The lines in the drawing created shapes, to which the artist added hatching, often covering up what he had previously written. The longer he worked on a sheet, the less remained visible beneath the layers of graphite. On the rare occasions when Horacek applied paint with a brush, everything underneath disappeared for good. This can be seen most clearly in his largest work, the exhibited Rudolf Horacek in Mannswörth, painted on a primed wooden panel. 

The artist did not want colored pencils of his own on his table; instead, he preferred pencils, often with varying hardnesses. When he did want to use a colored pencil, he would stand up and get it from another table where a colleague was drawing. After he carried out actions of this kind, the smile on his face was remarkable: as though he had done something very mischievous. He also created several etchings and a small handful of “landscape drawings.” Horacek created only a modest oeuvre consisting of a few hundred sheets, but it is an incredibly fascinating one, clearly distinct from all others in the history of Art Brut, as well as of great artistic value. The large-format painting Rudolf Horacek in Mannswörth became the logo of the museum gugging in 2006 because it is emblematic for this artist and is meant to symbolize the institution’s independence.