(b Schilde, Mark Brandenburg, 19 Sept 1934; d Switzerland, 25 Aug 1983). German painter, sculptor and kinetic artist. He first studied economics in Frankfurt am Main but then attended Ernst Geitlinger’s painting class at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich (1956–61). He was interested in the teachings of the Bauhaus masters. Early exposure to the work of Jackson Pollock was also important. His first works of the 1950s were white structures and reliefs, such as White Structure, 3 Fields (1960; Leverkusen, Schloss Morsbroich). In his works the artist was not concerned with composition as such but rather with the problem of organizing an image. Graevenitz produced the journal Nota with Jürgen Morschel (1959–60) and ran the gallery of the same name in Munich (1960–61), becoming involved with artists such as Otto Piene and Heinz Mack. In the 1960s the non-hierarchical homogeneous structures became kinetic, being additionally moved by motors, resulting in constantly new regular and irregular arrangements in individual modules, sometimes further agitated by light-reflecting material (e.g. Light Object, 1963; Kassel, Neue Gal.).