Hans Fahrni was still a child when his family emigrated to Germany. After the suicide of his father and the death of his mother, he was raised by his brother. Very young, he was passionate about the flute and chess, becoming a player at a very high level. In 1916, he was admitted for the first time to the psychiatric hospital of the Waldau. A temporary improvement of his mental health allowed him to move to Bern, but he had to be hospitalized once more. He divided his time between writing about chess for specialized magazines, competing at international tournaments and the production of drawings, starting in 1921. He developed a technique that involved cutting photographs of women in newspapers and copying them in an environment completely different from the original photo. His drawings in colored pencil exude a strange atmosphere, a combination of provocative eroticism and dreamlike fairy tale.