Adolf Wölfli was born in Bern, Switzerland in 1864. His father abandoned
the family soon after his birth, and at eight Adolf was sent to work as a
farmhand in hard, humiliating conditions. A year later his mother passed
away. At the age of 26 he was sentenced to two years in prison for the
sexual assault of young girls, and in 1890 he was sent for observation at
a psychiatric institution, for another alleged incident of attempted child
molestation. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed for the rest
of his life to the Waldau Mental Asylum in Bern, where he started painting.

- The discovery 

Dr. Walter Morgenthaler arrived at Waldau in 1907 as a young psychiatrist.
He noticed that W.lf li's unrest and violent f its of rage decreased when
he engaged in art, and began following his work. In 1921 he published the
groundbreaking study Em Geisteskranker als K.nstler (A Mental Patient as
Artist) about Adolf W.lf li and his work, an inf luential book which made
W.lf li the f irst renowned outsider artist (before the term "outsider art"
was ever coined).

- The work -
W.lf li painted in his cell all day, every day. He left behind a corpus of
24,800 papers densely painted and inscribed pages, as well as 16 notebooks