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English Aldona Gustas – 85th birthday
Happy Birthday!
We congratulate the lyricist and graphic artist Aldona Gustas warmly on her 85th birthday!
Aldona Gustas was born in 1932 in Karceviskiu, Lithuania. She had to flee during World War II and came to Berlin (West) in 1949. She has been working here as a writer since 1957, and as a a painter and graphic artist since 1970.
Female identity, eroticism and sensuality represent central themes in the lyrical and pictorial works by Aldona Gustas, which she has also combined in numerous publications. According to Olav Münzberg, spontaneity, brevity and simplicity are her basic constructive principles – in both her literary and visual works. Many of her speech-images are populated with paradoxes. As androgynous figures with the curves of their bodies transformed into fish or birds.
In 2017 her most recent volume of poems Zeit zeitigt was published by Corvinus Presse in an exclusive manual print-run. Currently an exhibition with 30 drawings, Aldona Gustas und die MUNDFRAUEN (Women’s Voices) – is travelling through museums and libraries in Lithuania for 2 years, organized by Browse Gallery and funded by Goethe-Institute Lithuania.
Apart of her own works Aldona Gustas contributed largely to post-war German art and culture when she founded Berliner Malerpoeten – Berlin Painter-Poets in West-Berlin in 1972 and organized international exhibitions for the group.
Lithuanian born Aldona Gustas also provided the opportunity to link an exhibition of Berliner Malerpoeten and six contemporary (female) Lithuanian artists in a common show entitled Oxymora, as part of Lithuania’s Presentation as Guest of Honor at the 2017 Leipzig Book Fair.
A portrait of Aldona Gustas on rbb Kultur: