Aldona Liobytė, PASAKA APIE NARSIĄ VILNIAUS MERGAITĘ IR GALVAŽUDĮ ŽALIABARZDĮ, 1970
She remembers seeing a rainbow for the first time in her life and realising how powerful bright colours can be, making a promise to herself that she would use this potential. Her strong, contrasting colour combinations create surprising optical visuals that open the doors to unearthly worlds. The artist notes that she was always a fan of “seeing the world in an unreal way”.
While studying graphic art at Lithuanian Art Institute, Žilytė married an artist Algirdas Steponavičius and ended up collaborating a lot with him. She was part of the generation of Lithuanian graphic artists from the 1950s, who established a new modernist way of thinking in the country, ending the dominating realism period.
Žilytė was a recipient of many awards, among which is the Golden Apple trophy at the BIB’69 Kids’ Illustration Biennale in Bratislava, golden medal at the Leipzig Book Fair in 1971, and the National Award received in the same year for illustrating children’s books. She was honoured by a H. C. Andersen diploma at the XV IBBY congress in Athens in 1976, and awarded Lithuanian Government’s Culture and Art Prize in 2010, along with National Culture and Art Prize in 2015.
