Gerold Heinz Luft-Pavlata was born in Linz, Austria in 1931 and studied painting at the Berlin School of Fine Arts with Max Kauss of the German expressionist school and engraving with Stanley William Hayter in Paris. For the duration of his studies, Gerold was the recipient of a national grant from the German government.
In 1961, he moved to Mexico, specifically to Patzcuaro, Michoacan, a small provincial town with a long pre-colonial history. There, Enrique, as he was called by his friends, was instrumental in founding a preservation committee to restore and protect the beautiful colonial buildings of the area. For 30 years, he worked at the Regional Museum of Folk Arts, first as a restorer of the building and then as Director leading mayor conservation projects.
As a painter and sculptor he explored the expressionist school and a wide range of tendencies in a career spanning five decades, with periods of conceptual, surrealist, and erotic works culminating in lithography,-which became his passion.
In his later years, he created a body of work which was inspired by found objects: slips of paper, deformed paper clips and twisted wires, which he called poster paintings because they carried a message written in German Gothic script. These same influences appeared in his lithographies.
Despite all his years in Mexico, Luft-Pavlata remained a German painter: precise, careful at ordering space, restrained, cerebral, sincere, spontaneous, yet poetic and intuitive. He used these same qualities not only to produce and order canvas but also to provoke the viewer into a chuckle of complicity or an amused smile of understanding of Luft-Pavlata’s vision and his world.
His oeuvre has been exhibited in San Francisco, New York, and several cities in Mexico.
From his writings, a book of Haiku poetry in English was published in Mexico City.