Aliute Mecys

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Aliute Mecys , also Aliute Meczies or Aliutė Mečys , (* 1943 in Koblenz ; † 2013 in Hamburg ) was a German artist with Lithuanian roots. Her work was described by herself as irrealism , but is also classified as surrealism .

Life

Mecys studied from 1959 to 1962 at the Walter-Leister school of painting and drawing in Trier ; from 1964 to 1968 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich . She then worked until 1979 as a set and costume designer at various theaters and television companies, including the Schillertheater Berlin , the Stockholm Opera , the Hamburg State Opera and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London.

In Hamburg, she worked with Götz Friedrich , the senior director of the State Opera, and designed hundreds of costumes a. a. for Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz and Bernd Alois Zimmermann's masterpiece of the modern music theater The Soldiers , which was performed in 1976 at the State Opera.

Her sketch sheets contain precise instructions on historical garment shapes with the individual characterization of the figures, whereby she likes to condense the realistic basic principle into the surreal. Mecys designed the sets and costumes for Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1978), which she was also involved in creating.

The Hungarian composer and teacher at the Hamburg Academy of Music owed her the reference to Michel de Ghelderode's play The Ballade of the Great Macabre , on which the libretto of his absurd doomsday spectacle is based.

Since 1979 she has lived as a freelance painter in Hamburg.

Works

The theater collection of the University of Hamburg has received the stage drawings by the painter Aliute Meczies. Most of the paintings are in private ownership, the estate was taken over by the Forum for Artists' Legacies in Hamburg. The former includes extensive series of costume figurines for productions of the Hamburg State Opera and the decoration designs for the world premiere of György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre , 1978 at the Kgl. Theater in Stockholm.

Mecys painted apocalyptic, disturbing, irrealistic pictures, among other things. A recurring motif in her pictures are the faces of her and also of György Ligeti (1923–2006), the avant-garde composer, while she was still with him.

Again and again she stressed that she was a painter and not a writer, to add: “What I have to say, my pictures say and if this did not make a statement, my intention would be wrong. [...] I paint realistic pictures of unreal realities and that's why I call my style irrealism. I paint pictures of our time in which the unreal is real. In my pictures I deal with life as I see it and experience it every day. "

Mecys did not seek conformity, but urged again and again for an ethical consensus; showed with pleasure and without harm or resignation the revaluation of all values ​​of a dull present; refrained from sharing his own suffering or even allowing it to be taken care of, even when, after the good years with Ligeti, the relationship ended in injuries and bitterness and a life-threatening illness.

reception

She did not create pictures that can only exist with a torrent of eloquence, but that disappear behind it with a verbose interpretation.

She made her pictures in the manner of the old masters with the greatest precision, in order to break them at the same time surreal, paintings that do not combine the beautiful and the ethically valuable as the citizens always want. In terms of content, this often leads to the simultaneity of unequal things, such as life and death, to hermaphrodites and to formal and stylistic breaks. Parents, phlegmacy, gender, violence, war and also the myths of Lithuania are discussed.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ New in the theater collection: stage drawings by Aliute Meczies
  2. ^ Aliute Mecys website
  3. ↑ Christine Eichel: From the exhaustion of the avant-garde to the networking of the arts. - Perspectives of an interdisciplinary aesthetic in Theodor W. Adorno's late work, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / Main 1993
  4. ^ Dietrich Erben: Composer portraits. From the Renaissance to the Present, Stuttgart, Phillip Reclam jun. 2008
  5. ↑ Peter Gorsen: Sexual Aesthetics. From the Renaissance to the Present , Rowohlt, Hamburg 1987
personal data
SURNAME Mecys, Aliute
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Meczies, Aliute; Mečys, Aliutė
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Koblenz
DATE OF DEATH 2013
Place of death Hamburg