[1] As a child, he showed a gift for drawing, with motifs taken from street life, woods and garden, and characters from books, including the Torah.

[1] Brauer survived the end of World War II hidden in a garden colony, whereas his father was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp.

[1] He was engaged there for culture and social life, leading a choir, making drawings for the youth newspaper and organising sports.

[1] He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1945,[5] supervised by Albert Paris von Gütersloh and Herbert Boeckl [de].

[6] Gütersloh promoted Brauer's work within the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism circle of artists, which had formed in the mid-1950s from a post-1946 Viennese surrealist group which included Brauer along with Edgar Jené [de], Ernst Fuchs, Maître Leherb (Helmut Leherb), Wolfgang Hutter, Rudolf Hausner, Anton Lehmden, and Fritz Janschka.

Despite the prevailing art-world taste for abstraction in the 1950s and early 1960s, Brauer's work successfully blended high craftsmanship and surrealism in ways that gained him international attention.

He married Naomi Dahabani in 1957 in Israel, and they settled in Paris in 1958,[7] where they made a living as singers (Neomi et Arik Bar-Or).

[12][6] On the occasion of his 70th birthday, the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien showed works from Brauer's private collection, including the cycle Die Verfolgung des jüdischen Volks (The persecution of the Jewish people), begun in 1973, Menschenrechte (Human rights), a 1975 cycle of etchings, stage and costume designs of Die Zauberflöte, the 1986 children's book Die Ritter von der Reuthenstopf, and the Sesam öffne dich, a 1989 television play with his daughter Timna, and designs for the Brauer House in Vienna.

[8] A retrospective of his art was presented at the Leopold Museum in 2015, entitled "Arik Brauer – Bilder des Phantastischen Realisten".

[7] From 1963, Brauer lived with his wife regularly in Israel for several months in summer,[7] in a building complex that he designed for an artist colony.

Die wunderbar realistische Welt des phantastischen Herrn Brauer, for which he designed the stage sets.