Gerhard Friedrich Wilhelm von Graevenitz

Gerhard Friedrich Wilhelm von Graevenitz was born in 1934 in Germany. He was the youngest of five siblings and had a twin sister. He first studied economics at the University of Frankfurt in 1955, but the following year shifted his focus to art, enrolling at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. From 1956 to 1961 he studied under Ernst Geitlinger, a German painter known for his work in abstraction.

Von Graevenitz approached art through systems of structure, motion, and chance. In the late 1950s, he produced white monochrome reliefs built from grids of concave and convex forms, using minimal materials to investigate progression, variation, and perception. By the early 1960s, he was working with kinetic objects powered by hidden motors and making serigraphs based on non-hierarchical fields and random distributions. He also developed light projections and modular constructions that examined the boundaries of visual order. In 1969, he created untitled plotter drawings on vellum, marking his first use of computer-controlled devices. These works followed earlier investigations of chance operations and grid systems that he had pursued throughout the 1960s. In the 1970s, he collaborated with mathematician Rolf Wölk on computer graphics generated by random processes. His practice explored visual perception and indeterminacy, often using repeated geometric elements in motion to generate compositions that changed with time or viewer position. His kinetic sculptures and screen prints highlighted variability, presenting shifting outcomes based on the system or sequence employed.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s von Graevenitz exhibited internationally, including The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, documenta IV in 1968, and the Venice Biennale in 1969. He was associated with the Nouvelle Tendance movement and participated in its major exhibitions. In 2018, a posthumous retrospective was presented at Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich. Von Graevenitz passed away in 1983.