Artur Hagen-Reck grew up in Vienna, where he completed his secondary education in 1943. Drafted the same year, he was wounded at the Battle of Stalingrad — an ordeal from which he never recovered and which led to his first hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital. After the war, he tried to start a new life; he not only began studying medicine, but also gave piano and violin concerts. He however did not finish the studies he undertook and he was again hospitalized in 1955 at the psychiatric hospital in Gugging, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. There he started to create. He possessed a construction kit Märklin with which he constructed all kinds of objects. The kit became for him an entire world, which he called “planetarium” and to which he dedicated a number of drawings and writings.