20th-21st Century Spanish

Michavila trained to become a school teacher and also studied Fine Arts in Valencia. His career as an artist took off in the 1950s as a member of the Los Siete group. He also joined the Parpalló and

 Arte Vivo 

an art movement founded in 1962 by Alberto Greco, whose aim was to capture reality as it is (movements, conversations, gestures, attitudes, smells, places, etc.) without any kind of transformation.

groups and, in 1967, the

 Antes del Arte 

in 1967, the art critic Vicente Aguilera Cerni promoted an art group in Valencia which was the starting point for a new movement grounded in Op and Kinetic art. The mandate of the group was to establish nexuses between science and art. Optical illusions, impossible figures and images deriving from Gestalt psychology were critical elements in its creations.

movement, a group in which, on the contrary to the heterogeneity of , all the members shared a similar aesthetic, halfway between constructivist and kinetic, and above all a common quest to fuse science and art. At a later stage, Michavila evolved towards a much more gestural aesthetic closer to the abstract language of Informalismo.

The artist was a lecturer at the School of Fine Arts of Valencia and a Professor at the Teachers School of Valencia until his retirement. In 1975, his trajectory was distinguished with his appointment as an academician in the San Carlos Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Valencia, where he held the post of director from 2003 to 2007.

He has taken part in many solo and group exhibitions in Spain and abroad. His countless recognitions include the 1996 Alfons Roig Prize, the 2001 Generalitat Valenciana Medal to Cultural Merit, the 2006 Ciudad de Valencia Gold Medal and the 2007 Generalitat Valenciana Visual Arts Prize.