Gerhard von Graevenitz, 1966, portrait by: Antje von Graevenitz
Gerhard von Graevenitz
Gerhard von Graevenitz (1934–1983) spent twenty-five years asking what happens to a picture when it will not hold still. Born in Schilde in the Prignitz, he studied economics at Frankfurt for a year before entering the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1956 under Ernst Geitlinger. With Jürgen Morschel he edited the little magazine nota — four issues, 1959–60, given to international art and concrete poetry — and the two ran a galerie nota in Munich that showed the kinetic artists nobody else would. From 1958 he made white monochrome reliefs, fields of small convex and concave points and circles set on a grid and worked through as progressions, degressions, and chance constellations: structure as something generated rather than composed. His first kinetic object followed in 1961 and his first light objects in 1963, and in 1966 he built the light-wall shown in London, in Eindhoven, and at the 1970 Venice Biennale. He co-founded the Nouvelle Tendance in 1962, moved in the international ZERO circle, was included in The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and brought three large kinetic objects to documenta 4 in 1968. From 1970 he lived in Amsterdam, where he also worked as a curator and organiser. He died on 20 August 1983 in a plane crash near Habkern in the Swiss Alps, at forty-eight, together with his partner Wies Smals, the founder of the Amsterdam art space De Appel. The two proof prints held here date from 1976 and put his systematic structures through a plotter — the machine doing explicitly what his grids had implied all along.
2 physical works
