Reinis Zusters studied art briefly in Germany before arriving in Australia as a Latvian refugee in 1950. The following year, he held his first solo show, in Canberra, where he was employed with the Department of Works and went on to exhibit with the Art Society. He studied art for two years in the early 1950s at East Sydney Technical College; in 1952 the Art Gallery of New South Wales purchased his portrait of John Price Strange (Churchill's gardener). Over the ensuing decades he exhibited regularly in Australia and overseas. In the introduction to the catalogue Reinis Zusters, published in Sydney in 1971, Lloyd Rees wrote of his friend's zest for living and 'complete freedom of emotional expression', expressed in work that 'stands out with a vividness that can almost be alien at times'. Zusters made thirteen huge paintings titled The Birth of a Nation for the Bicentenary in 1988. His murals include Man's Struggle for Identity in Trans City House, Sydney and a World War II memorial in Christchurch Cathedral, Newcastle, which he won the competition to complete. Married three times, he moved to the Blue Mountains in the early 1970s and remained there for the rest of his life, often painting his surrounds. He won the Daily Telegraph Art Prize in 1957, the Hunters Hill prize in 1958 and 1959, the Wynne Prize in 1959, the Rockdale Prize in 1962 and the Bendigo Prize in 1963; he won the Special Prize at the Osaka Triennale in 1993. His portrait of potter Peter Rushforth was exhibited in Portraits of Australia: The Doug Moran National Portrait Prize Collection in 1988. He is represented in the collections of the National Gallery and all major Australian galleries.
