German-born Venezuelan artist Gego was a leading figure in abstract art in Venezuela in the 1960s and 70s. She worked extensively with two- and three-dimensional forms to investigate notions around line and space.
Read MoreGego was born Gertrude Goldschmidt in 1912 in Hamburg, Germany, into a Jewish family. She studied architecture and engineering at the University of Stuttgart, receiving double degrees in 1938. Only a year later, Gego left Germany to escape Nazi persecution and settled in Caracas, Venezuela, where she worked as an architect before turning to artmaking in the 1940s. Apart from a brief stay in New York in 1960, the artist lived in Caracas for the remainder of her life.
Elements of line and space are integral to Gego's work, which explores the generation and evocation of form through drawings and three-dimensional structures often made of metal meshes and wires.
In the early 1950s, Gego began exploring abstraction along with her contemporaries in Venezuela. She engaged with the possibilities of the line to evoke the presence of a form through works such as Sphere (1959), which consists of horizontal, vertical and diagonal metal rods that create to a spherical silhouette without forming a solid object.
Sphere also reflects Gego's interest in movement, causing the viewer to experience an illusion of motion – even as the artwork remains static – as they move around the work. Such experimentation with the notion of movement led Gego's work to be associated with Kinetic Art, as well as Geometric Art, although the artist did not consider herself to be part of any particular movement.
Among Gego's most significant works is the installation Reticulárea (1969), created for the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas, which comprises an expansive network of steel wires that spread across the exhibition space from the ceiling to the floor and along the walls. Reticulárea developed into several other series that, whether flat or sculptural, feature a system of lines, grids and modules that open up space and evoke form. In 'Chorros (Streams)' (1970–1), for example, aluminium and iron rods create cascading structures that, suspended from the ceiling, allude to flowing water.
Shadows generate new drawings in 'Dibujo sin papel' or 'Drawing without paper' from the late 1970s and 1980s, in which metal rods and clasps are assembled into geometric or irregular shapes that are often suspended from the ceiling. Under harsh lighting, the lines of the metals translate into drawings in shadows on the adjacent wall or the floor to become, in effect, drawings without paper.
Gego exhibited internationally in her lifetime and her work continues to be shown in solo and group exhibitions.
Gego: Measuring Infinity, a major retrospective exhibition of Gego's practice organised by Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), features 200 works from the early 1950s to the early 1990s. Following its debut presentation at Museo Jumex in 2022, Measuring Infinity will travel to the Guggenheim Museum in March 2023.
Solo exhibitions include: Lines in space, LGDR, Paris (2022); Gego: The Emancipated Line, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2021); Gego, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2020); Gego, MASP, São Pualo (2019); Between the lines. Gego as a printmaker, Amon Carter Museum, Texas (2017).
Group exhibitions include: La próxima mutación, Fundación La Caixa – CaixaForum, Barcelona (2022); Women in Latin American Art, Nader Art Museum Latin America, Miami (2020); Invisible Cities: Architecture of Line, Waddington Custot, London (2018); Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2023
