Franz Hitzler was born at Thalmassing near Regensburg in 1946 in Thalmassing. In 1962 he travelled alone to Amsterdam to study Rembrandt in the original. After this crucial encounter, Franz Hitzler decided to become a painter. That same year he attended the Augsburg Art School, where he was a pupil of Heinz Butz's. The following year Hitzler established a studio of his own at Asbach-Bäumenheim. In 1967 Franz Hitzler continued his studies at the Munich Art Academy, finishing in Fritz Nagel's master class. In the late 1960s Franz Hitzler turned to both sculpture and ceramics and in 1970 he did his first woodcuts and monotypes. In 1972 Hitzler moved into a studio in the Haidhausen section of Munich. During the years that followed Hitzler developed an iconography of his own as well as a distinctive formal idiom: the statements he made with his art became more pointed, his forms were consolidated and increasingly bold, with increased emphasis on line. At the age of thirty-two Franz Hitzler had his first one-man show. A trip to Venice in 1979 enabled Hitzler to study Titian at the Accademia. In 1981 Hitzler was awarded a Förderpreis by the Bavarian Ministry of Culture. A year later he embarked on slit and collaged pictures. In 1997 he became a regular member of the Academy of the Fine Arts in Munich. Franz Hitzler deals primarily with the fateful influences on our lives, the experiential spaces between suffering and the turn to positive experience, which he translates into painting distinguished by spontaneous and impulsive handling. Many public and private collections own examples of Franz Hitzler's work.