GEGO

In her new country of residence, Gego dedicated to design, furniture making, and the development of architectural projects. Additionally, she began a long teaching career that would lead her to be one of the founders and subsequent professors of the Institute of Design from the Neumann Foundation (Caracas) in 1964. It was during the 1950s that she deepened her artistic practice, which was at first of a figurative, expressionist type, and then —already in dialogue with kinetic artists like Alejandro Otero and Jesús Rafael Soto— of a sculptural type, grounded upon spectator participation, action, and movement as key principles of production.

Her work is characterised by the experimentation with lines upon space, conceived as the most elemental unit of drawing, as well as for the innovative use of the grid, a form intimately related to abstraction in modern art. In 1969, Gego exhibited Reticulárea at the Caracas Museum of Fine Arts, an installation whose importance in the history of art cannot be understated. It is an assembly of modular pieces made of steel and aluminium, which constitute an apparently organic vast structure, which experience is marked by the rupture of the spaces that hold them in place.

Courtesy Galería RGR