Markus Haub: One-Offs from a Car Designer’s Studio

By Silvia Gonzalo, Germany Correspondent

Trained at Pforzheim University, Markus Haub designed for Lamborghini, Bentley, Audi, Volkswagen, and Seat, and his student drawings made their way to Porsche’s design studio. He began painting while at Renault, where the head of design bought four of his paintings, and his Racing Legends series has been exhibited at the museum that houses the world’s largest Bugatti collection.

After Volkswagen bought Bentley and Audi bought Lamborghini, at one of the group’s design centers on the Mediterranean, the young German designer Markus Haub imagines a successor to the Diablo, the Italian marque’s scissor-door supercar. His sketches will become part of the project that gives birth to its heir, the Murciélago, named, as Lamborghini tradition dictates, after a fighting bull. Today he says the car has barely aged and that its restrained lines are refreshing. For him, everything in a car begins with its proportions.

For Bentley, a brand that belonged to Rolls-Royce for decades, he develops a large twelve-cylinder sedan meant to succeed the Arnage, the company’s flagship. With the modelers he builds scale models to give it a much more modern look. His favorite moment always comes when the wheels go on the model: that’s when it finally looks like a car.

By his account, at the same design center he also helps prepare the fifth-generation Volkswagen Golf and a luxury Audi sedan for production. For Seat, he works on the Ibiza and draws for the Fórmula sports concept car.

In his childhood bedroom in Mainz, Germany, on the banks of the Rhine, hung posters of a Porsche 959 and a Ferrari F40, the great rivals of the eighties, and his dream was to draw cars like those.

In 1993 he passed the entrance exam at Pforzheim University, near Stuttgart, home of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz, to study car design. It was one of the few places in the world that taught it at the time, like the schools in Pasadena or Detroit. Getting in was perhaps the happiest moment of those years. There were only five in his class.

In Italy, with his classmates and his analog camera, he toured the Bugatti factory in Campogalliano, in the heartland of Ferrari and Lamborghini. It was building the EB110, a quad-turbo twelve-cylinder supercar he considers perhaps the most fascinating Bugatti of all. The plant was so spotless you could have eaten off the floor, and to him it felt as if works of art were being made there. The photos from that visit stayed tucked away for decades before he digitized them.

His student drawings hung on the wall, and one day one of his instructors, who came from Porsche, took some down and brought them to Weissach, near Stuttgart, where the brand designs and develops its cars.

He interned at Opel, at the Audi Design studio in Munich, at Austria’s Storz Design, and at the French coachbuilder Heuliez in Turin. One summer he arrived at the design center Volkswagen had built in Sitges, and after graduating he joined the staff. It was a young team from all over the world that went out together at night, and every summer there was a big party in the studio courtyard. Those years left him with true friends.

In 2000, Renault hired him for its newly opened advanced design studio in Barcelona. He remembers those years as the era of bold design. He was part of the team behind the Laguna Coupé and lived through the arrival of digital design: drawings moved onto screens, and machines began carving models directly from those files. Renault, he says, was ahead of the curve. For Dacia, the group’s Romanian brand, he designed the interior of a prototype and worked on the Sandero project.

He spent two years at Renault’s studio in central Paris, near the Bastille, focused mainly on the Mégane, the brand’s compact car. By his account, when he returned, his team was the only one working on the Twizy, Renault’s tiny electric car. In 2007, when the company wanted to send him back to Paris, he resigned and struck out on his own. “I wanted more freedom.”

He had been painting for years, alongside his design work. His first paintings came from cinema: frames from The Fifth Element, Luc Besson’s film starring Milla Jovovich, who fascinated him and whom he immortalized in many works. At the entrance of Renault’s Spanish studio, a display case held small paintings of his from another film with her, Wim Wenders’s The Million Dollar Hotel. One day Patrick le Quément, Renault’s head of design, bought four. For Markus Haub, it was a great joy.

On his own, he was painting more than before. First came the cars of Le Mans, Steve McQueen’s film about the twenty-four-hour race held every year in that French city, and in 2008 he began Racing Legends, his series on the competition cars of the sixties and seventies, the golden age of motorsport. They took to the track in their sponsors’ liveries: the powder blue and orange of Gulf Oil, the stripes of Martini vermouth. In Germany, the orange of Jägermeister liqueur. They are iconic colors, he says, that give those cars a great deal of character.

He works from his own photographs, taken at events like the Goodwood Festival of Speed or at the Nürburgring racetrack. He prints them on canvas, then scrapes and paints over them in bold, sometimes fluorescent colors before finishing them with a glossy varnish. The result, he says, surprises even him. He likes returning to the same cars again and again, from different perspectives, “a bit like Andy Warhol.”

The series’ first major exhibition was at Gentlemen Drive, a private luxury car club somewhere between showroom and lounge. His friend Oriol Vilanova, whose family founded the club, bought the centerpiece: a triptych about six and a half feet wide depicting a Porsche 917 in the Gulf colors Steve McQueen brought to the screen. The 917 gave Porsche its first overall win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Of the whole series, that painting from his early days is the one that means the most to him.

Racing Legends, now more than a thousand works strong, has been shown at the Cité de l’Automobile in Mulhouse, the French museum that houses the world’s largest Bugatti collection. In Germany, the Meilenwerk in Düsseldorf, a center devoted to classic cars, showed twenty-nine works from the series.

Mercedes-Benz commissioned works from him to celebrate its millions of social media followers, one of them dedicated to the S-Class Coupé. In Portugal, he created the commissioned poster for the exhibition Lendas da Competição at the Museu do Caramulo.

The British accessories house Otway & Orford turned one of his works inspired by the Porsche 911 into a silk pocket square.

New York appears in many of his cityscapes, and American collectors seek him out.

He lives mostly in Mainz, the hometown of Gutenberg, inventor of the modern printing press, in the house his father built in the eighties and where he grew up. Since 2020, that house has been Studio H49, the workshop and gallery he founded with his partner, the Spanish abstract painter Susana de Val. It opens its doors to concerts and exhibitions, such as Mainz Collective, the show through which they want to build a community of the region’s artists. Most of their events come about fairly spontaneously: when an idea comes up, they make it happen. Every November they hold their art market in the style of Germany’s Christmas markets, with mulled wine by the fire. “Today I’m very happy with what I do.”

Markus Haub is a gearhead: in the garage sits an air-cooled 1970 Porsche 911, transformed to his own vision and built especially for him. Since its completion, it has covered more than 31,000 miles. If he had to part with his cars, that one would probably be the last to go. “Oh, that’s a tough one. I like them all.”

In His Own Words

What does a car need to have for you to want to paint it?

I love vivid colors, so black or white doesn’t work so well, because the shape doesn’t come through. I also like rounded shapes in my paintings. That’s why cars from the sixties are a good fit. An old Porsche 911 in a loud color is ideal. With my commissions, though, I go by my clients’ preferences, and so far they’ve always been very happy.

Design and painting are two different worlds for you. What did the designer still give the painter?

The program at Pforzheim University was very artistic. Besides the project work, we also had painting, drawing, and sculpture. Everything was very free, and you could experiment a lot and develop your own style. Later, working as a designer, I came across Photoshop for the first time and began reworking my drawings and renderings digitally and putting together elaborate presentations. That was essentially the foundation of my technique today, which is based on digital image editing, collage, and painting with acrylic or spray paint. A wild mix.

Which American race car do you find the most beautiful, and why?

As a kid, I was fascinated by the Vector W8 from the late eighties. It’s not a race car, but it was one of the supercars of its time, and it had an incredible 1,200 horsepower. Today, though, I’d name the Shelby Daytona Cobra Coupe or the Ford GT40. It won the 24 Hours of Le Mans four times and was simply breathtakingly beautiful, especially in the Gulf Racing colors.

Texan Carroll Shelby led Ford to victory at Le Mans and turned the Mustang into a legend. What does a German car designer see in a Shelby Mustang?

Back then, the Mustang created an entirely new class of car: an affordable, attractive sports car with a long hood and a short deck. That was sexy and incredibly successful. It surely also owed its fame to the film Bullitt with Steve McQueen, and as the Shelby GT500 it ultimately reached its absolute performance peak and became immortal in the movie Gone in 60 Seconds with Nicolas Cage, even if no original cars were used there. A great connection between film culture and car culture.

Which movie car would you love to paint? From James Bond’s Aston Martin to the Ferrari Testarossa from Miami Vice, anything goes.

I’ve already immortalized both in paintings, the Aston Martin even several times. I once did a series called Stars&Cars. It included the DB5 and the Lotus Esprit from the James Bond films, the Ferrari 308 from Magnum, P.I., and James Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder. The one I’m still missing is Herbie, the Volkswagen Beetle from The Love Bug films, and I could well imagine painting it.

Every supercar wears its brand’s badge on the hood and almost never the names of those who imagined it. In Germany, I met one of them: his paintings do bear his signature.