Christian Ludwig Attersee was born in Pressburg/Slovakia in 1940 and moved to Austria in 1944. Today he lives in Vienna and in Semmering (Lower Austria). 

Attersee spent his youth in Aschach near Linz and at the Attersee in Upper Austria, he was one of the great sailors of Austria - hence the pseudonym Attersee. He not only made a name for himself as a visual artist, but also as a musician, writer, object maker, designer, stage designer and filmmaker. However, Attersee is above all regarded as one of the most important representatives of representational painting in Europe over the last 50 years, he is a loner in almost all areas of the fine arts.

First exhibitions from the middle of the 60's bring success, also the friendship and cooperation with artists like Günter Brus, Gotthard Graubner, Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz, Hermann Nitsch, Walter Pichler, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener and others. 
Since Attersee's first inventions of objects (1964-66) in the field of eroticism and everyday life, he has been regarded as an independent co-determinator of European Pop Art. 

Attersee is the great loner of the Austrian art of the 60s, antipole to Viennese Actionism. In the second half of the 70s, Attersee was the founding figure of "New Austrian Painting".