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Molacek studied business affairs in Vienna and worked as guest professor at the University for Applied Arts Vienna from 1985 till 1991. In addition to his own artistic activities, from 1983 he started to put together his own and very personal collection of contemporary art. This collection is currently on long-term loan to the Neue Galerie Graz. From 1991 till 1992 he presented his work at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York. In 1994 he represented Austria at the International Graphics biennial in Zagreb and, during the same year, his works were also presented in Ljubljana. In 1997 Rudi Molacek was represented at Secession Vienna. In 1998 he participated in the steirischer herbst festival in Graz. In 2005 he showed his works at ARCO Madrid.
After many years of focussing on conceptual photography, painting, computer-controlled media and the media world, the former fashion photographer now focuses on topics of image technology ranging across painting, photography and experimental new substrate material. One of his main motifs since the 1990s is the theme of flowers. Beginning in what are still large-scale, extremely enlarged views, in pop-art loud colours, this photography forms the basis for large-scale abstractions. Images, created with light sources through spontaneous photography, are laminated onto the ‘noble’ substrate material of aluminium discs. The stripped-off edges, scrap material generated during production, are also put into an artistic context by Molacek. He would for instance simply staple them to the wall of the exhibition space, as an ‘abstraction of second order’.
Molacek’s current digital prints remain without tactile materiality. Just like in his photography, fictive spatial expansion and a certain “non-perceivability” of the carrier surface define the structure of the image. Digital data imitate heavy brush strokes and colour streaks, which build up in brilliantly staggered depth, their shimmers reminiscent of nature, like the shimmering surface of a lake.
In his photography, the more "conventional" expressive tableaux or super-dimensional computer paintings and silkscreen works, he investigates contemporary industrialisation and anonymisation. Molacek’s "industrial Junk aesthetics" (Peter Weibel) finalise the consequences of the aesthetics of technical reproducibility.
Despite his conceptual reflections on the medium of painting, a hedonistic approach – being his own principle of life – also determines Molacek’s work.