Gego preparing her intricate sculpture Reticulárea at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1969 Photo by Juan Santana; © Fundación Gego
A major survey devoted to Gertrud Goldschmidt, better known as Gego, will conclude the Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriands year-long series of exhibitions and symposia dedicated to women artists from the 16th century to today.
Gego was born in Hamburg and later studied architecture and engineering in Stuttgart before fleeing Nazi persecution in 1939 and settling in Caracas, Venezuela, where she lived for the rest of her life. Although she was a leading figure of the kinetic and geometric abstraction movement of the 1950s and exhibited internationally during her lifetime, she “remained a peripheric figure in the history of art for most her career”, says the shows curator Pablo León de La Barra. “Research developed after her death, together with the revalorisation of the work of artists who acted outside hegemonic circuits of art validation, especially women, have shed a new light of her work.”
The artist developed a signature parallax effect that makes her sculptures appear to be in motion. She made her most famous series of works, Reticulárea, meaning an “area of tiny nets”, from 1969 to 1976. The sculptures were made using aluminium and steel components fixed together to create expansive wire grids that are suspended from the ceiling. Gego called her sculptures “drawings without paper”.
Gego at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, in 1962 © Fundación Gego; Photo: Joseph Fabry
The exhibition brings together works from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s, including sculpture, drawings, prints, textiles, site-specific installations and archival photographs. It fits into the museums curatorial programme this year “not only because Gego explicitly demonstrated feminist ideas in her work, but precisely because, as a female artist, she was able to develop her own particular practice in a predominantly male-dominated context”, León de La Barra says.Read More – Source
