Michaela Polacek worked in an office for five years. Unsatisfied with her career prospects, she took a year off and obtained a pilot's license for a single-engine aircraft. After returning to her original job, she fell ill in 1998 and underwent extensive medical treatment.

It was during her hospital stay that she first explored art. Upon her release, she worked for a few years at Atelier Gugging, where her work received its first real recognition. She then withdrew from art and continued to draw in her apartment until an art collector friend told her about plans for Atelier 10, which she would be joining.

Polacek creates compositions that can sometimes reach almost three meters in height. Complex and abstract, his works conceal figurative forms such as "Brustbusenmadonnen," or women's heads, whose grimaces and hairstyles serve as a kind of underlying order to his pictorial compositions. Polacek's intention, however, is that their conception remain as enigmatic and hermetic as possible, like a wild dream.