Josef Hofer

Josef Hofer died on Friday 23 October 2026 in Ried im Innkreis, Upper Austria, aged 81, shortly after being admitted to hospital with complications of a pulmonary infection. His death was announced by the Christian Berst gallery in Paris, which had opened his last exhibition only weeks earlier, and was reported by Le Quotidien de l'Art on 27 October and by ARTnews and Le Monde on 28 October. Some early reports gave his age as 80. Funeral arrangements were not made public.

Josef Hofer was born on 17 March 1945 in Wegscheid, in Bavaria, close to the Austrian border. He was disabled from birth, with an intellectual disability, very limited hearing and speech and, later, restricted mobility. He grew up with his brother Walter, five years his senior and similarly disabled, on the family farm at St. Johann am Wimberg in the Mühlviertel, Upper Austria.

The end of the Second World War was followed by ten years of Soviet occupation of the region, and the family lived in complete isolation out of fear of mockery and of how the boys might be treated. Josef never attended school, but he drew from childhood, copying picture books and depicting the farm around him. None of those early drawings survive.

His father died in 1977. In 1982 his mother moved with both sons to Kirchschlag, where they were looked after by a cousin, Renate Sager. The new surroundings brought him into contact with other people, including his cousin's children, and he began to communicate in single words.

From 1985 Hofer attended the day workshops of Lebenshilfe Oberösterreich, a support organisation for people with disabilities, first in Linz and then in Grein. In November 1992 he moved into the Lebenshilfe residential home in Ried im Innkreis and worked in its day workshop. At the beginning of 1997 the art historian Elisabeth Telsnig founded a drawing group there. She quickly recognised the originality of his drawings, made sure from 1998 that his output was systematically kept, and became his lifelong champion, handling exhibitions, galleries and materials.

His early subjects were farm life, horses, carts, tools and agricultural machines, along with toy diggers and tractors. From about 2001 he concentrated on full-length nude self-portraits, often observed for hours in a mirror by his bed. The figures are enclosed in his characteristic frames of yellow, orange and red, which critics have read as a protective cocoon. He worked with a ruler, graphite and coloured pencils, erasing and reworking until he was satisfied, and signed his drawings Pepi. Later works also drew on the nudes of Egon Schiele.

In 2003 the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne gave him his first solo exhibition and made him a member of its collection, which holds around a hundred of his works. In 2004 he won first prize at the Euward, the European art prize for painting and graphic art by artists with intellectual disabilities. Lausanne held a second exhibition, Josef Hofer and the Mirror, in 2012. He was shown by the Christian Berst gallery in Paris from 2008, and by galleries and museums across Europe, including a retrospective at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Prague in 2010 and a major exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Thurgau at Warth, Switzerland, in 2022. The writer and former Lausanne director Michel Thévoz wrote about his work. His fifth exhibition at Christian Berst, Josef Hofer: The Motif in the Mirror, ran in autumn 2026 with a catalogue raisonné and monograph.

Hofer lived from 1992 until his death at the Lebenshilfe home in Ried im Innkreis, where he drew in the workshop most mornings. He rarely spoke and communicated largely through signs and drawing. Elisabeth Telsnig, who described him as laughing as he gathered his pencils and set to work, remained close to him for almost three decades. When he turned 80 in March 2025 she told the Upper Austrian newspaper OÖN that he was well and still drawing, though much less than before.

Hofer is regarded as one of the leading art brut artists of his generation. Arnulf Rainer called him one of the greatest contemporary art brut artists. His work is held by the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which acquired an important group of drawings in 2021, and by collectors such as Antoine de Galbert and Bruno Decharme. The Christian Berst gallery holds his estate. The Mo.Co contemporary art centre in Montpellier planned to include his work in an art brut exhibition opening in December 2026. Christian Berst said that drawing was for him a way of inhabiting the world and that his work, of rare intensity and humanity, would long continue to move people.