Mostly self-taught artist lived in the Communist GDR until 1980, when he was expatriated to West Germany. As early as 1960 he began to create paintings of stick figures and a range of pictograms that he called Standarts. From the early 1980s he was recognized for his primitive images, which he rendered in paintings, prints, and sculpture, and was acknowledged as a leader of the German Neo-Expressionist movement..