Stasys Eidrigevičius

Biography

In 1972 a twenty-three-year-old student from Vilnius travelled to Poland for the first time, at the invitation of a bookplate collector from Bydgoszcz. Bookplates took him to the country where he would later settle for good.

Stasys Eidrigevičius was born on 24 July 1949 in the village of Mediniškiai in northern Lithuania. In 1956 the family moved to the village of Lepšiai near Panevėžys. From 1964 to 1968 he studied at the college of applied art in Kaunas (by some accounts in the department of leather goods design), and then, until 1973, at the art institute in Vilnius (now the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts); his teacher is named as Jonas Švažas. He began exhibiting in 1969. His first notable awards came for bookplates: medals at the International Biennial of Exlibris in Malbork in 1973 and 1975, and a gold medal there in 1980. In 1974 he served in the Soviet Army. In 1975 and 1978 he tried without success to obtain the right to stay in Poland, and only in 1980 was he given permission to reside there permanently. He settled in Warsaw that year. He renounced his Soviet citizenship in 1988.

One of the first books he illustrated was “The Robot and the Butterfly” (“Robotas ir peteliškė”) by Vytautė Žilinskaitė (Vilnius, 1978). Polish editions followed: “The King of the Ravens” by Pierre Delarue won him a prize from the Polish Book Publishers’ Association in 1980 for the most beautiful children’s book. In all he illustrated about forty books, most of them for children, among them Charles Perrault’s “Puss in Boots” (Zurich, 1990) and “Little Pig” (London, 1992), a text by the author Ramachander. At the Biennial of Illustrations Bratislava he received gold plaques in 1979, 1981 and 1989, and the Grand Prix in 1991. For that biennial the Czechoslovak post office issued, in September 1991, a stamp with a reproduction of his painting “Pinocchio”. In 1986 in Barcelona he won a Grand Prix for his illustrations to a book by Zbigniew Batko.

He has been interested in posters since 1984. The Grand Prix of the International Biennial of Posters in Lahti (1989), third prize at the Warsaw poster biennial (1990), a gold medal in Toyama (1994) and first prize at the Biennial of Polish Poster in Katowice (1999) make up only a partial list.

From the early 1990s he made performances and installations: “Road” (1992, Kraków), “Well” (1993, Vilnius), “Circles” (1995, Perth), “Passing Water” (1997, Japan), “Erotics” (1998, Warsaw) and “Rain” (2000, Tel Aviv). In 1993–1994 the “White Elk” (“Biały jeleń”), a play in which he was both director and the figure on stage, was produced at the Studio Theatre in Warsaw. Films have been made about him, among them “Seven Mysteries According to Stasys” by Andrzej Papuziński (1994). His pictures are described in terms of loneliness, alienation and sadness, of the grotesque and the absurd, with memories of village childhood. He himself invented the genres of masks and of the so-called “smutki” (Polish for “sorrows”). To my mind, this says more than any words about his faces with enormous eyes.

In 2000 he received the Officer’s Cross of the Order of the Grand Duke Gediminas of Lithuania, in 2001 the National Award in Arts of Lithuania, in 2010 the silver medal “Gloria Artis” for merit to culture in Poland, and in 2019 the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. In 2008 his handprint was placed on the Avenue of Polish Stars by the philharmonic hall in Gdańsk. In the Japanese city of Otaru there is a museum, “Hiroko Mori & Stasys Museum”, and in 2024 the Stasys Museum opened in Panevėžys.