(b Petrikau, Poland [now Petrikov, Belarus’], 30 March 1929). German sculptor. He began studying sculpture at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Berlin, in 1948. From 1952 to 1954 he studied with Alexander Gonda (b 1905). In 1954–5 he was in Florence on a scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. From 1955 to 1972 he worked in Berlin, apart from two years (1963–5) as artist-in-residence at the University of Notre Dame, IN. Despite receiving numerous prizes in his early years, Otto later came to consider only the work produced after 1961 as fully valid. In the 1960s his work was characterized by a preoccupation with contorted human figures. From 1969 Otto produced his first wall–figure combinations. These consisted of figures placed in front of and squeezed between walls and were intended as expressions of social constraint. From 1972 to 1973 he was on the teaching staff of the Technische Hochschule, Brunswick, and in 1973 he was appointed a professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Bremen. In 1981 he was an honorary guest at the Villa Massimo in Rome. Although in his work he began to treat a greater variety of subjects and themes, Otto’s basic intention remained to show the viewer contemporary human beings in conflict with one another and with the world outside. For Otto, being contemporary did not mean being remote from everyday problems, and he regarded form and content as interdependent. He gave expression to his desire for public impact in his sculptures, and a number of them were erected in public places in Germany and the USA, for example Adam (1980) in the Botanisches Garten, Hamburg. In 1982 Otto received a commission to re-create Hugo Lederer’s monument to the poet Heinrich Heine in the Rathausmarkt in Hamburg, which the Nazis had destroyed in 1933. His later series of mythological couples, for example the Aphrodite Cycle of sculptures, proves that he could transmute intensely personal subjects into convincing three-dimensional forms.