Josef Hofer, the Austrian outsider artist whose raw figurative drawings made him one of art brut's most admired figures, has died at 80. His Paris gallery, Christian Berst, said he died in Ried im Innkreis, in western Upper Austria, on Friday 23 October, shortly after being hospitalised with complications from a pulmonary infection.

Born on 17 March 1945, Hofer was hidden from Nazi forces as a child by his parents because of a speech and developmental disability; his brother shared similar disabilities. He rarely spoke and was hard of hearing, and instead expressed himself in drawings that recorded his own life, including erotic nudes set inside a signature frame drawn in reds, yellows and oranges, as though enclosed. His family kept him in rural isolation even after the Nazi regime fell, fearing contact with the invading Soviet army, and only after his father's death in 1977 did the family move to Kirschlag, where he began meeting other people and was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Ried.

He found drawing in 1985 and went on to make thousands of works on paper in coloured pencil, moving from farm life to frank erotic nudes partly inspired by Egon Schiele. Art historian Elisabeth Telsnig discovered him at a drawing class in 1997 and helped bring his work to institutions: a first show at the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne in 2003, a retrospective at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Prague in 2010, and a major exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Thurgau in Switzerland in 2022. His work is now held by the Centre Pompidou and collectors including Antoine de Galbert, Bruno Decharme and Arnulf Rainer.

Christian Berst, who showed Hofer's last exhibition in Paris this autumn, said creating was a vital necessity for him, a way of inhabiting the world and leaving a mark on it. Mo.Co, the contemporary art centre in Montpellier, is mounting an exhibition of his work, I Am the Phantom of My Own Opera, from 5 December to 2 May 2027.