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Lot Essay
Mavignier left Rio de Janeiro in 1951 for Paris—“that’s where the Mona Lisa is,” he noted of his chosen destination—and he soon emerged as a key figure in the transatlantic history of Concrete art (in S. Lemoine, “Almir Mavignier: nove tendencije,” in The Artist as Curator: Collaborative Initiatives in the International Zero Movement, 1957-1967, Gent, 2015, p. 293). In Paris, he connected with François Morellet, Ellsworth Kelly, and Georges Vantongerloo, among others, and exhibited his first Concrete paintings at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1953. From 1953 to 1958, Mavignier studied in the Visual Communication Program at the newly established Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm under former Bauhaus instructors, including Josef Albers, Johannes Itten, and Walter Peterhans, as well as with Max Bense and Max Bill. During this highly generative period, he collaborated with artist groups including Zero, founded by Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker (Düsseldorf, 1957-66), and the collective Gruppo N (Padua, 1959-67). In the late 1950s, Mavignier began his now iconic work in graphic design, creating posters for a host of artists—including Paul Klee, Abraham Palatnik, El Lissitzky, and Jesús Rafael Soto—and institutions from the Galerie Denise René to the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.
Mavignier exhibited his “dot” paintings in 1957 at the Municipal Museum in Ulm, with a keynote introduction by Max Bill, and later in the seminal period exhibition, The Responsive Eye, organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965. Begun in 1954, the dot paintings took as a point of departure Klee’s dictum: “If a line meets another line, they meet in a point, and this point is an energy point, which contains the whole power of the two lines meeting there” (in A. Medosch, New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961-1978), Cambridge, 2016, p. 83). To create these works, Mavignier used a tool (sometimes the head of a nail) to apply raised dots of paint in grid-based, geometric patterns, producing a wave-like chromatic vibration. In vorn und hinten 7, three vertical bands of green dots appear to oscillate across the black ground, perceptually receding in and out of focus in response to variations in the density and size of the dots. This mutable, tactile structure allowed Mavignier to “deform geometrical structures and discover ‘unknown geometries,’” explained the critic Armin Medosch. “Although produced with painterly methods, Mavignier’s pictures, especially from a distance or in photographs, look as if they were technically produced. Mavignier came to see the distribution of dots on a surface according to Bense’s ideas about order and redundancy, trying to achieve more with less, an optimized balance between expenditure of energy and communicative value. Mavignier’s dot-based grids are like prototypes for the information aesthetics of the network age: arrays of colored bits optimized for circulation in electronic networks” (A. Medosch, New Tendencies, op. cit., p. 83).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Mavignier exhibited his “dot” paintings in 1957 at the Municipal Museum in Ulm, with a keynote introduction by Max Bill, and later in the seminal period exhibition, The Responsive Eye, organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965. Begun in 1954, the dot paintings took as a point of departure Klee’s dictum: “If a line meets another line, they meet in a point, and this point is an energy point, which contains the whole power of the two lines meeting there” (in A. Medosch, New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961-1978), Cambridge, 2016, p. 83). To create these works, Mavignier used a tool (sometimes the head of a nail) to apply raised dots of paint in grid-based, geometric patterns, producing a wave-like chromatic vibration. In vorn und hinten 7, three vertical bands of green dots appear to oscillate across the black ground, perceptually receding in and out of focus in response to variations in the density and size of the dots. This mutable, tactile structure allowed Mavignier to “deform geometrical structures and discover ‘unknown geometries,’” explained the critic Armin Medosch. “Although produced with painterly methods, Mavignier’s pictures, especially from a distance or in photographs, look as if they were technically produced. Mavignier came to see the distribution of dots on a surface according to Bense’s ideas about order and redundancy, trying to achieve more with less, an optimized balance between expenditure of energy and communicative value. Mavignier’s dot-based grids are like prototypes for the information aesthetics of the network age: arrays of colored bits optimized for circulation in electronic networks” (A. Medosch, New Tendencies, op. cit., p. 83).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park