Alfred Hofkunst was born in Vienna in 1942. In 1948 he moved to Zurich with his family. He did an apprenticeship as typesetter and theater painter, later he worked as a stage designer at the Stadttheater in Bern. From 1965 he was a freelance artist and became internationally known for his realistic drawings. In 2004 he died in Cudrefin.

Each stage of his art was surprising and new – after the first literary etchings he devoted himself to drawn objects of his environment; Rolling shutters, windows, garden fences, carpets, fishing rods, light bulbs and flies, and the legendary mattress now hanging in the Stedeliijk Museum in Amsterdam. He worked with the tip of a pencil or color pen, which he slid over the paper in a hating way. He dismantled the subject into a dense fabric of gossamer strokes and at the same time immersed his imagery in a magical light.

Alfread Hofkunst designed a unique and rare set of Swatch watches from 1991 with a fashioned organic, eye-tricking, sculptural trompe-l’oeil.