Eberhard Matthies
Set Designer, Painter, Graphic Designer
He was born in Magdeburg on 8/7/1937. He studied scenography and costume design at the Applied Arts College in Magdeburg (1955-1958), as well as at Berlin University of the Arts and Fine Arts Academy in Rome (1958-1964). Initially he worked as assistant to director Erwin Piscator at the Free People’s Theatre in Berlin (1964-1965). As a scenographer, he worked in executive positions with the Theater Basel, Schiller Theater in Berlin, State Theater of Kiel, Theater of Krefeld-Mönchengladbach and State Theater of Magdeburg. He also worked as set designer in theaters in many German cities: Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, etc. He has worked for movie productions by German companies Bavaria München, NDR Hamburg and SFB Berlin. Since 1990, he has been active and exhibits as a painter, too. In 2013, he embarked on a large-scale project of artistic interventions, under the general title “Plan for peace and against war.” The project, combining German and French initiatives, relates to painting 10 surviving WWII Buckner aircraft in France and Germany. He collaborated with the GNO three times, designing the scenery for the operas Macbeth (Olympia Theater, 2002/03), György Ligeti’s Le grande macabre (Olympia Theater, 2003/04) and Don Giovanni (Acropol Theater, 2006/07).