Gego
Gego
*In reference to her solo exhibition at the Guggenheim NY, visited in July 2023.
Trained as an architect and engineer, Gego was born in Germany in 1912 and immigrated to Venezuela in 1939, fleeing anti-Semitic persecution. There, she developed a prolific artistic career since the 1950s, working in various mediums, including sculpture, paintings, drawings, prints, and textiles, that explored the creation of space through line and volume.
My first sight of Gego's work happened online on the occasion of her first retrospective exhibition in Brazil at MASP, São Paulo, in 2019. I remember seeing views of her works, especially the sculptures from the series "Reticuláreas," and thinking about architectural structures—especially metallic ones meant for large spaces—such as those in Mies van der Rohe's "An Interior Perspective of the Convention Hall, Chicago, Illinois, 1952–54." Still, little I knew about her work and background. Years later, in 2023, I finally got to experience her works in person in the show "Gego: Measuring Infinity" at the Guggenheim New York. Gego has explored different mediums throughout her artistic career, but my initial curiosity and later interest in learning more about her practice rely, among other themes, on the ways she created open structures that sprawl in space as well as the possibility of compositions with different lines and their potential modular solution. The more I looked at her work, though, the more it made me think of their disruptive capacities to alter existing spaces.
From her first colorful paintings and drawings of landscapes to the elaboration of an abstract lexicon based primarily on lines, the artist engaged in creating space. Looking at different works in the Guggenheim show, it feels her work is never done in the order of the object, but in exploring space making and how it affects us—mainly visually, but considering we have to move our bodies around it too in the case of the sculptures.
Works from different series explore lines drawn irregularly in tridimensional space, creating specific rhythms and a sense that their surroundings have been transformed and, even more, disrupted. In a more conceptual sense, when looking at Dibujo sin papel 79/2 (1979), I have the impression that it points out an openness of forms. Departing from a square, a primary shape, the artist transforms the bottom right corner into a smaller square with a concentric pattern of rectangles that are once again opened on the bottom right corner. In the Reticulárea series, lines made of metallic wire intersect based on triangles or squares, forming a network that creates space in multiple directions. These lines twist, turn, and sometimes close within circular and cylindrical forms or are left open to other potential arrangements. This idea of the potential of forms takes a different character in the environmental work Reticulárea (ambientación), first presented at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas and the Center for Inter-American Relations (today's Americas Society) in New York in 1969 and later—until 1982—in other places in Venezuela, the United States and Germany. With various designs and pieces made of a mesh of metallic wires that went from floor to ceiling and were composed specifically for each iteration, the work modifies the space with the pieces, allowing visitors to have a different perspective of the work, one that involves their whole bodies. Seeing the images of the different installations gave me the sense that visitors were embedded in curtains of wire mesh, creating a rhythmic impression of a room previously simply made of plain walls, opening and closing the space around them in a visually stimulating way. If the sculptures deal with the delicacy of the lines drawing tridimensionally with some degree of irregularity due to being handmade, the installation appears like a maze as it alters an institutional placid interior and creates noise due to the variety of arrangements, composing a sort of dissonant music.
Her public works also seem to present this capacity to transform an environment and take one's perception beyond the existing architecture. Among the ones exhibited in the show, Cuadriláteros (1982) at the subway station La Hoyada in Caracas caught my attention. Amid the movement of everyday life, people's eyes are taken up and transported elsewhere by the dynamic composition of light-colored rods and darker joints in square shapes.
Gego reminded me of the line's potentiality and capacity to affect our perception when applied to tridimensionality, which not only measures but builds infinitely.
