Gego

Gego (born August 1, 1912, Hamburg, Germany—died September 17, 1994, Caracas, Venezuela) was a Venezuelan artist associated with geometric abstraction, a type of art that uses flat shapes to create nonobjective compositions, and kinetic art, a form of art that relies on motion. She is known for her exploration of line in her immersive handmade wire sculptures and in architecture, drawing, printmaking, and weaving.

Born Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt in Hamburg, Gego used a portmanteau of her first and last names throughout her artistic career. She was one of seven children in a family of Jewish origin. She was interested in art from a young age and often copied poems and short stories into a notebook and then illustrated them. In 1932 she enrolled at the Technische Hochschule (Technical University) Stuttgart, Germany, and studied with the architect Paul Bonatz. She graduated in 1938 with a degree in engineering with an emphasis in architecture.

The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany subjected Gego and her family to anti-Semitic discrimination, and they fled the country in 1939 to avoid persecution. While her parents moved to England, Gego settled in Caracas, where she was granted a visa. The number of opportunities for women and nonnationals was limited, however, and she worked as a freelance architect for several firms. In 1940 she married German entrepreneur Ernst Gunz, and they set up a workshop in their home for designing furniture and lamps. Gego also designed two houses in Caracas, one named Quinta El Urape, where the couple and their two children lived. Gego separated from her husband in 1951, and their divorce was finalized in 1952—the same year Gego received her Venezuelan citizenship.

In 1953 Gego met graphic designer Gerd Leufert, who became her lifelong companion, and they moved to the coastal village of Tarma. Gego taught at several design and architecture schools, but it was in this moment, in her forties, that she began to focus on her artistic career in earnest. Drawing from her extensive knowledge of architecture and design, Gego began experimenting with parallel lines. She explored their structural and spatial possibilities in drawings, collages, watercolours, monotypes, and wood engravings. In 1954 Gego exhibited her work for the first time, at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas.

By 1957 she had begun creating sculptures that challenged kinetic art, the emerging field in which a work moves on its own or through viewer intervention. Gego’s bold iron sculptures, however, do not move. Instead, they appear to have motion via the parallax effect, in which the shape of a static object seemingly shifts or vibrates based on the viewer’s movement around the object.

In 1959 Gego moved to the United States, where she worked with printmaking instructor Mauricio Lasansky at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Although Gego had shifted her focus from sculpture, her prints continued to explore parallel lines and often had a sculptural quality. She employed an inkless intaglio process in which sheets of paper were deeply embossed, generating subtle impressions into the paper. Later, in 1963, she enrolled at the Pratt Institute, New York, where she made engravings, etchings, and handmade books. From there she traveled to Los Angeles to make prints at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Her recognition in the United States grew, and in 1960 her work was shown at the renowned modern art gallery Betty Parsons in New York City.

Upon Gego’s return to Venezuela in 1960, her sculpture underwent a major transformation from her early heavy, black metal works to lighter wire pieces made by hand. These organic forms, which hung from the ceiling, were woven together from a network of triangular shapes. In 1969 this process culminated in her most significant body of work, Reticulárea—immersive installations composed of stainless steel and aluminum wire that span the ceiling and walls to create netlike curtains. Gego’s sculptures broke away from the grid imposed by geometric abstraction, taking a nonhierarchical approach to creating forms in space. They were groundbreaking in their shift away from the conventional idea of sculpture as a solid volumetric mass. Over the next decade Gego made several series of wire sculptures inspired by nature, including Chorros (Streams), Troncos (Trunks), and Bichos (Bugs).

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From 1976 to 1988 Gego made her largest series of wire sculptures, Dibujos sin papel (Drawings Without Paper), three-dimensional drawings where wire replaces the graphic, drawn line. These handwoven rectangular wire sculptures hang a short distance from the wall, so when the sculpture is lit, it casts shadows onto the wall, generating an image, or drawing. Gego incorporated bits of found objects into these sculptures: cork, thread, springs, nails, coat hangers, and metal tubing. Following this series was Gego’s final body of work, Tejeduras (1988–92; Weavings), which also incorporated found objects. In these art pieces, Gego wove together strips of paper from magazines, advertisements, paper from cigarette packets, and images of her own work.

Gego was widely recognized in Venezuela and received numerous awards throughout her career, including the National Prize in Drawing at the Salón Oficial Annual de Arte (1968) and the National Prize of Fine Arts (1979) at the Salón Las Artes Plásticas en Venezuela. It wasn’t until after her death in 1994 that Gego received solo exhibitions at major museums around the world, including “Gego, Between Transparency and the Invisible” (2005), held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Drawing Center, New York; “Gego: Line as Object” (2013), in Germany at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and in England at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; and “Gego: Measuring Infinity” (2022–23), at Museo Jumex, Mexico City, and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.