Graphist & artist: Almir da Silva Mavignier
Artist biography Almir da Silva Mavignier, born in Brazil, 1925 has been a visual artist, graphic designer and pedagogue. Prior to emigrating to Europe, he founded with a colleague a studio that held painting classes for patients of psychiatric hospitals. At the time, he was interested in Gestalt theory and began making connections between science and art. Since 1946 he pursued his artistic training with a painter Árpád Szenès in Rio de Janeiro, then he moved to Germany in the beginning of the 50s, matriculating to the Ulm School of Design which strenghtened his peculiar relationship to art with a scientific approach. Since the beginning of the 1950s, the artist devoted himself to the Concrete Art: during this first period he produced his first drawings with grid structures, then switched to the Optical Art and created some monochrome pictures.
Almir da Silva Mavignier, CONVEX-CONCAVE, 1968, courtesy of the net
In 1954 he produced his first work resulting as a serie of geometrically ordered points: the precise application of dots on the canvas generated a number of optical illusions, such as the impression of depth, a distorted perception of the intensity of color or the feeling of vibration. In 1958, the artist joined the art group Zero where he had worked for some time with Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, Lucio Fontana and Piero Dorazio. But Mavignier believed that art and design are related, distinguished only by their goal, so the next year, Mavignier founded his personal studio in Ulm, Germany where he worked as a freelance graphic designer, developing a parallel career as an artist, too.
Almir da Silva Mavignier, COMPOSIÇÃO SÉRIE PUNCTON”, 1976, courtesy of the net
In 1965, Mavignier occupied the post of painting professor at the State School of Fine Arts in Hamburg. In three years, the artist founded there his own studio. Mavignier has always been interested in the didactic-pedagogic aspect of visual research, and consequently in teaching. He considers the school-art binomial the logical result of contemporary artistic research. He teached at the “Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst” in Hamburg. Almir Mavignier died in Germany last year.
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Auctions results According to the website Artprice.com, the turnover of Mavignier's artworks in 2018 (21 lots sold) worths 205K dollars. From the beginning of the century, Mavignier's biggest buyer is Germany with a rank of 851K dollars (58% of lots sold), while in USA is 490K (29%). There are no artworks by Almir Mavignier currently listed in upcoming public auctions.