Klaus Fussmann was born in Velbert near Düsseldorf in 1938. He studied at the University of the Fine Arts, West Berlin, from 1962 to 1966. In 1972 he received the Böttcherstrasse Bremen Prize and the Villa Romana Prize in Florence. From 1974 to 2005 he taught as a professor at the University of Arts, Berlin. A retrospective was shown at the Kunsthalle Bremen in 1992. In 2011 he was awarded the Order of Merit and in 2018 the Culture Prize of the State of Schleswig-Holstein. Fussmann lives and works in Berlin and Schleswig-Holstein.