The art of costume in Gražina Konstancija Remeikaitė's exhibition 5
In brief: A rare exhibition of artist Gražina Konstancija Remeikaitė's costume examples is taking place at the A. Žmuidzinavičius Memorial Museum throughout March. Most of the examples are stored in Lithuanian Theatre, Music and Cinema Museum in Vilnius. Hence, this large and comprehensive exhibition focused on the main creative activities of the artist was prepared from the funds of the museum and private collections of the artist.
G. K. Remeikaitė is a fashion, theatre and film costume designer. She was born in 1934 on the 25th of November in sculptor Kostas Remeika’s family, in a small town of Josvainiai, Kėdainiai district. After graduating from the Art Institute, artist worked in painting and graphics funds of the Art Museum, but an unexpected acquaintance with Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas’ daughter Lena turned her life to the opposite direction. Gražina received an offer from Lena to work at the Vilnius Models' House where she worked from 1962 till 1974.
Gradually, sketching and fashion modeling became artist's daily routine, thus while still working at the Vilnius Models' House G. K. Remeikaitė started working in theatre and film production. This period was even longer - combining the fields of theatre and film artist worked productively until 2001.
G. K. Remeikaitė describes her work in theatre as the activity that gave her the most excitement and joy and her acquaintance with director J. Miltinis as the prime and most important event of her life. According to Gražina, the most interesting thing for her was to draw the sketches of the costumes, therefore artist was creating only costumes for the plays and not the whole scenography.
Gražina's costume drawings were always marked by diligence, accurate drawing, pictoriality, aesthetic presentation and attention to every - even the smallest detail of clothing. That is why at the exhibition we see them framed as separate, sequentially completed pictures. Among other things, the characters of the plays depicted in the sketches are dynamic and expressive. Artist managed to perfectly convey the nature of the characters.
G. K. Remeikaitė liked to work on historical costumes. She tried to follow the artistic ideas or forms prevailing in a particular century. Artist mostly worked with plays and films, the plots of which were connected to the period of 19th century. Creating this kind of work artist spend a lot of time in libraries, studying the illustrations in detail and analyzing the literature on the history of costume.
