Outsider artist Josef Hofer, known as "Pepi," dies at 80

Austrian outsider artist Josef Hofer has died at the age of 80. He passed away on Friday, October 23, in Ried im Innkreis, a town in western Upper Austria. He died shortly after being admitted to hospital with complications from a lung infection, ARTnews reported. The Paris gallery Christian Berst announced his death.

Outsider art is work made by artists who have no formal training and who usually sit outside the mainstream art world. Hofer was known to friends and collectors as "Pepi," his affectionate nickname. It is the German diminutive of Josef, and he signed his works with it. The gallery describes his signature as random sequences of the letters in that name.

Hofer was born on March 17, 1945, in Upper Austria. As a child, his parents hid him from Nazi forces because of a speech and developmental disability. He grew up in the region and lived there for the rest of his life.

His art came to wider notice late in his life. In 1997, the art historian Elisabeth Telsnig discovered him at a drawing class in Austria. Six years later, in 2003, his work was shown at the Collection de l'art brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, a museum devoted to art made outside the mainstream. The Centre Pompidou in Paris, one of Europe's largest modern art museums, owns his work.

Hofer's death is the kind of news that often reaches the art world quietly. For the people who worked with him, from the gallery that represented him to the historian who first found him, it is a personal loss. The gallery's announcement is the main public statement so far.