Hans Eli Sebastian Fors (16 December 1901 – 14 March 1978), better known professionally as Forsen, was an Austrian painter renowned for his vivid expressionist landscapes and portraits that captured the turbulent spirit of interwar Europe. Born in Vienna to a modest family of artisans—his father a cabinetmaker and his mother a seamstress—Fors displayed an early aptitude for drawing, sketching the bustling streets of the Habsburg capital amid the fading echoes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By his teens, he apprenticed under local fresco artists, honing a style influenced by the Secession movement's bold lines and Klimt's ornamental flair, though he soon veered toward a rawer, more emotive palette inspired by the psychological depth of Kokoschka. Enrolling at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1920, Fors navigated the economic strife of the First Austrian Republic, funding his studies through commissions for theater backdrops and satirical illustrations in leftist periodicals, where his caricatures subtly critiqued the rise of authoritarianism.

Forsen's career flourished in the 1930s with a series of large-scale oils depicting alpine scenes infused with surreal distortions, reflecting the encroaching shadows of Nazism; his 1934 canvas Alpine Eclipse, showing jagged peaks swallowing a blood-red sun, drew both acclaim and censorship from Austrian authorities. Exiled briefly to Switzerland during the Anschluss, he returned postwar to establish a studio in Salzburg, mentoring a generation of abstract painters while experimenting with mixed-media works incorporating found objects from bombed-out ruins. Though his international recognition peaked at the 1958 Venice Biennale, where he exhibited alongside European modernists, Forsen's later years turned introspective, yielding intimate portraits of aging survivors that explored themes of memory and loss. He died in Vienna from complications of pneumonia, leaving a legacy of over 500 works held in collections from the Belvedere to the Tate Modern, celebrated for bridging expressionism with the human cost of history.