Fritzi Libora-Reif

FRITZI LIBORA-REIF

b. 1905, Prague, Czech Lands, Austro-Hungarian Empire
d. 1990, Bürmoos, Austria

SELECTED WORKS

BIOGRAPHY

At the age of 60, a year after her husband's death, Fritzi Libora-Reif was introduced to a spiritualist circle. Through a medium, her spirit guide appeared and told her that she had a task to accomplish. The spirit guide, a Chinese man, trained her as a mediumistic artist.

After first writing or scribbling a kind of strange writing from right to left, her hand became lighter and lighter and finally began to draw weightlessly. Her works are equally weightless and poetic in their dreamlike quality. They are very delicate and yet very clearly drawn. While working, Libora-Reif used a magnifying glass to draw the very fine lines and shapes.

Fritzi Libora-Reif lived in a mountain village near Salzburg, Austria, in a very small two-room cottage. She worked on a simple wooden table with papers of the same size, using only one pencil and three different colored pencils.

For her mediumistic drawings, she used a photograph of a person to concentrate on. She considered the resulting drawing to be the inner portrait of the person as a symbolic representation of the "garments of the soul". The drawing is a symbolic visualization of the arena of inner life and the spiritual path with guardian spirits and personal guides, fluid beings, flowers representing inner qualities, pearls for painful events the soul has gone through, and so on.

The work at CoMA is a true masterpiece by Fritzi Libora-Reif. It is one of her rare depictions of an enlightened spirit in a flower and fruit robe with a dolphin.

PUBLICATIONS

Paola Giovetti: Arte medianica. Pitture e disegni dei sensitivi. Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1982, pp. 186-190.