Josef Hofer

b. 1945 · Ried, Austria

He grew up on a remote farm without ever going to school, and found his language at last in pencil: the human figure, framed and reframed, signed Pepi.

The life

Hofer was born in 1945 in Wegscheid, Bavaria, with disabilities affecting his mobility, hearing and speech, and grew up in near isolation on the family farmstead in Upper Austria, never attending school. After his father’s death the family moved, and from his late thirties he lived in care institutions, where creative workshops gave him materials for the first time. At an institution in Ried his drawing caught the eye of the art historian Elisabeth Telsnig in 1997; she began collecting, cataloguing and championing the work, and Hofer, who signs himself Pepi, became one of the most admired draughtsmen in contemporary art brut.

The work

Graphite and coloured pencil on paper, drawing as his sole medium. Male figures, frequently nude and often self-portraits, are held inside heavy hand-drawn frames and borders, the body dissected and recombined from several viewpoints in a single sheet, with mirrors a recurring device. The Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne holds some fifty drawings, and his work is also in the Arnulf Rainer Collection in Vienna and Collection abcd in Paris.

Why we love them

Forty years without an audience, then some pencils, and out came one of the great bodies of self-portraiture. The frame he draws around himself is the whole story.

Go deeper

• Josef Hofer at the Outsider Art Fair
• Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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