Austrian-Romanian painter, draughtsman, and sculptor, Iosif Steurer was born in Vienna into a family with a craft tradition, his father working in wood and ironwork. He completed his early education in Merano, where he also attended the School of Arts and Crafts, before moving to Munich in 1903 to study painting under Hekel and Tasio at the Wass and Wolf School. In 1905 he settled permanently in Romania following his marriage to the painter Maria Ciurdea, with whom he would share both his life and his exhibition practice.

His work spanned landscape painting, satirical drawing, and small-scale sculpture. As a caricaturist, he collaborated regularly with publications including Furnica, Rampa, and Dimineața, producing satirical texts and images directed at the political class. His sculptural output, developed in part through five years of work alongside Dimitrie Paciurea, consisted primarily of small terracotta and wood pieces operating in a caricatural and fantastical register. In landscape painting, his technique is characterized by rapid, varied brushwork across a predominantly cool palette of greens and blues, with ochre and brown accents.

During the interwar period, Steurer exhibited almost annually in Bucharest and Constanța, to consistent critical and public interest. He participated in over twenty group exhibitions and held nineteen solo shows. From 1946, however, he was effectively banned from institutional exhibition spaces, his work refused from group shows and his access to gallery venues revoked. He refused to adapt his practice to ideological demands, a position that left him without commissions or sales for years, sustained only by a close circle of friends. A joint retrospective with Maria Ciurdea Steurer was organized by the Union of Visual Artists in 1959.

His stated credo, "art with honesty," defined both the integrity and the institutional marginalization that marked the final decades of his career.