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Gertrude Honzatko-Mediz, daughter of Austrian artists Emilie Mediz-Pelikan and Karl Mediz, began creating art through spiritualist practices following her mother’s death in 1908. As a teenager, she entered trance states during séances, claiming to receive artistic instruction from her mother and other spirits. Guided by these “spirit friends,” she produced drawings and paintings that explored dark, symbolic, and visionary themes as a means of coping with her loss.
Her father, deeply impressed, described her as a genius comparable to Goya and Klinger, and even incorporated her mediumistic imagery into his own work. Over time, Gertrude’s art evolved to include etchings, pastels, and small paintings that blended Symbolist, Expressionist, and spiritualist aesthetics, echoing artists like Ensor and Munch. Her “spirit portraits,” depicting figures from German medieval legends, reflected both her personal mysticism and her collaboration with her father’s unrealized Wagnerian projects.
Gertrude’s practice illustrates a rare fusion of spiritualism and artistic agency—an autonomous collaboration between artist and spirit world that situates her within the broader history of mediumistic art.
The Collection of Mediumistic Art (CoMA) is a private collection assembled over 40 years by psychologist Elmar R. Gruber, whose lifelong interests in art, transpersonal psychology, and paranormal experience converged in his fascination with mediumistic creation. Initially drawn to the phenomenon as a student in the late 1970s, Gruber began acquiring works not out of a desire to form a collection, but to live among them and study the unique circumstances of their creation. His curiosity about the shared themes, symbols, and styles among artists who had no contact with one another—often separated by time, geography, and culture—eventually inspired him to formalize his holdings into a cohesive collection. Along the way, Gruber developed close relationships with several mediumistic artists, including Narciso Bressanello, Milly Canavero, Zory Lovari, and K. N. Narayana Murthy. Today, the CoMA includes over 1,700 works by more than 60 artists, revealing striking resonances and hidden connections across decades of spirit-inspired creativity.