Fritzi Libora-Reif

SELECTED WORKS

BIOGRAPHY

At the age of 60, one year after the death of her husband, Fritzi Libora-Reif was introduced into a spiritualistic circle. Through a medium, her spirit guide came forward and told her that she would have a task to accomplish. The spirit guide, a Chinese, trained her as a mediumistic artist.

After initially 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 just as weightless and poetic with 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 cottage with two rooms. She worked on a simple wooden table always with papers of the same size with only one pencil and three different colored pencils.

For her mediumistic drawings, she used the photograph of a person to concentrate on. She considered the resulting drawing as 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, fluidic beings, flowers that represent the inner qualities, pearls for painful events through which the soul has already passed, and so forth.

The work in the CoMA is a true masterpiece by Fritzi Libora-Reif. It is one of her rare representation of an enlightened mind in a blossom robe and fruit robe with a dolphin.

PUBLICATIONS

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