Friedrich Hundertwasser was born in Vienna, Austria in 1928 as Friedrich Stowasser, the son of a Jewish mother and a Christian father. His father died when he was one year old, and he was raised by his mother. He entered the Vienna Academy of Art but left after only three months. At twenty-one he changed his name to Hundertwasser, translating the Slavic "sto" at the beginning of his name to the German "hundert".

In 1959, together with the painters Arnulf Rainer and Ernst Fuchs, he developed a new programm for artists called “Das Pintorarium”. At the Seckau monastery in Styria, Hundertwasser presented his “Moldiness Manifesto”, a document that enjoyed great popularity during the heyday of the counter-culture. In his “Los von Loos” (Break away from Loos, 1968) manifesto he denounced the aridity and rigid aesthetics in art, and provocatively demanded more beauty and more kitsch.

Hundertwasser also spoke up for general issues and concerns such as the preservation of the Hainburg marshlands near Vienna (1984), and campaigned against nuclear power plants. He later demonstrated for having Austria's car number plates independently designed, and in 1993, he protested against Austria’s planned accession to the EC. He always advocated strong, autonomous, authentic, headstrong, and green views.

In 1959, Hundertwasser lectured at the Academy of Arts in Hamburg, Germany. From 1981, he held a master class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In addition to his splendid atelier in Vienna, Hundertwasser had workshops and homes in a remote mill in Lower Austria, in the Normandy, at Guidecca in Venice and, in his last decades, in Kanui / Bay of Islands in New Zealand.