The Austrian-born artist Dieter Rossi graduated from the Vienna Academy of Art in 1965, having spent a year in 1962–3 studying photography at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, USA. In 1966 he moved to London, and from September 1999 to February 2001 he showed his works in his own gallery, The Rossi Gallery, in Brick Lane in London’s East End. The titles of his exhibitions during this period, including ‘The Art of Extremes’, ‘Fighters’, ‘Sex’, and ‘The Thousand Year Reich’, highlight his political and social concerns, including the horrors of totalitarianism, genocide and terrorism. His paintings hold no punches, depicting human emotions both beautiful and horrific, gentle and harrowing.

Though he has produced well over a thousand paintings and drawings over the last three decades, he has rarely exhibited since his Brick Street days, relying on his website to show his works. As he writes there, ‘I have been lucky, never having had to earn money from painting, always having other well-paid jobs which provided for a comfortable living.’

Since 2003 he and his second wife Zelda have lived in rural Dorset in the south of England, and for the last ten years they have spent the summer in Italy, by the Lago Bolsena in Alto Lazio.

Rossi’s art includes landscapes, portraits and fantasy scenes, but a great deal of his work features the naked human body, laid out on large boards and canvases with all the rawness and messiness of human physicality.

Dieter Rossi’s website, where you can see many of his oil paintings, watercolours and drawings, can be found here.

We are very grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for suggesting the inclusion of this artist, and for supplying most of the images.