A strand of interconnected metal pipes erupts from the ceiling, falls to the floor, bounces up and out, and remains suspended, as if passionately inscribed in the air by a giant hand. This so-called “Chorro”, or flow, is actually the language of the whimsical, long-unrecognized German-Venezuelan artist Gego (1912-1994), his painstakingly established metal language.
        Gego is the subject of a major travel retrospective, Gego: Dimension of Infinity, which will be on display at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City until February 2023. The exhibition will continue in March at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and end at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Meanwhile, the gallery LGDR in Paris has just launched an artist survey called Lines in Space.
        Gego studied architecture in Germany. Gego was born into a progressive, wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg. She only started making art at 41, inspired by her partner, graphic designer and artist Gerd Leifert. Despite a late start to her career, she soon made a famous and influential artistic career in her adopted country of Venezuela, where Gego found refuge after fleeing the Nazi regime in 1939.
        Inspired by local cinematic art and geometric abstraction, she held a retrospective in 1977 at Sofia Imber, Caracas Museum of Contemporary Art. Her public works can still be seen throughout Caracas and she has taught at the Central University of Venezuela and at the Neumann Foundation School of Design.
        Chorros installation at the Barquisimeto Museum, 1985. Courtesy of LGDR, photo by Tony Russell.
        “Our mission is not only to sell, but to expand the audience and knowledge of Gego,” said Emilio Steinberger, senior partner at LGDR, who curated the Paris exhibition with gallery co-founder Dominique Levy. This is the third exhibition of Gego’s work since LGDR became the first international commercial gallery to partner with her estate in 2015.
        Of decisive importance for the mission was a personal acquaintance with the works of Gego. “It’s a very poetic, sublime work that can be appreciated in real life,” adds Steinberger. “Such an ephemeral wire sculpture does not exist [on the net].”
        Gego is known for her art associated with “transparency”, refusing to call her creations sculptures, which she believes are indestructible by comparison. “Three-dimensional shapes of solid materials. Never what am I doing!” she wrote.
        To this end, she playfully explores the thread as an “autonomous” entity, developed from her architectural and engineering background at the Stuttgart Institute of Technology, where she was one of the last in the “Night of Broken Glass” or “Night of the Crystals”. An exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart earlier this year focused on the impact her technical background had on her unique visual language.
        “I was taught as an architect to draw lines with a clear meaning that define form or space, as symbols of limitations that never have a life of their own. Many years later, I discovered the charm of the lines themselves,” she writes. “Sometimes the line in the middle is just as important as the line itself.”
        Gego working on the Chorros installation at the Barquisimeto Museum, 1985. Courtesy of LGDR, photo by Tony Russell.
        One of the highlights of the Paris exhibition was the freestanding “Chorro” that Gego began producing in 1979, one of about 15 larger releases of its kind. To which she later added her innovative “Reticulárea” (meaning “network areas”) forms, consisting of triangular mesh structures composed of thin wires or thin rods in braided nets of various geometries. “Grid zones” can open up and fill a room like spontaneous constellations, or fall down like a tapestry. They are irregular, organic, fragile and cosmic because they are metallic energies vibrating in space. Unlike networks, they have no real center, beginning, end, or clear definition.
        Thanks in part to, as she puts it, her work being “do-based” and “creating for fun,” Gego tends to eschew artistic categories and trends. From the 1950s to the 1980s, it intersected with movements that charged the South American art scene but bypassed them. These include kinetic art, which features her friends including Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez, and geometric abstraction by Alejandro Otero, as well as regional concrete art movements.
        “At one time she was very irritable and could have been anything,” recalls her granddaughter Esther Crespin Gunz at the opening of LGDR, who was easily recognizable due to the family resemblance. An introvert, Gego rarely discusses her art with her family and usually prefers to work independently, though new research from the Stuttgart Museum of Art shows she has collaborated with other artists, including Venezuelan dancer and choreographer Sonya Sonoha.
        “When she discovered stainless steel wire, she could work on her own and was very spontaneous and direct from start to finish because she didn’t need someone else to figure out what she was doing,” said Crespin, an architect and one from the founders. the Fondación Gego in Caracas, created after the death of the artist. (Another grandson was the painter Elias Crespin.) By contrast, large public works and early parallel-line sculptural forms made from heavier metal rods required the help of trained craftsmen.
        Gego works alone or hires a student to help with larger 3D works, but many of her drawings and watercolors on paper are done in an isolated studio, Gego’s son Thomas Gunz told Artnet News by phone with Say. Many of these works have been included in Parisian exhibitions and traveling retrospectives. Other works on display include her magnificent “Dibujo sin papel” [drawing without paper], mesh spheres and other forms, books, prints, “Bichos” (small animals or beetles), parallel line work, and her later “Tejeduras” ( braids). ).
       Although Guntz was aware of his mother’s active and celebrated career in Venezuela, he says that “we only began to understand the relevance of her work after her death, when the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston held its first international solo exhibition [in 2002].
        “Despite the efforts of a few select scholars and curators over the past two decades to establish Gego’s place in the modernist canon, she remains an obscure figure in the United States,” said Pablo Leon, Latin de la Barra curator. wrote. American Art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and fellow curator Janine Gutiérrez-Guimaraes, in an email to Artnet News. Both helped develop the current retrospective, which aims to promote “greater understanding and appreciation of [Gego's] work in the context of 20th-century modernism.” the ramps in the rotunda highlight Gego’s conversations with other creators and the public.
        Gego’s profile really rose with an international touring retrospective at the 2002 Houston MFA show, originally organized by the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, and another big step was the first big show in 2013 at the Kunsthalle Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany. It continues at the Art Museum in Stuttgart and the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, UK.
        Exhibition in Hamburg “Gego. The line as an object “has become a starting point for the perception of her work in Europe, and for many it has opened the eyes,” said Brigitte Kölle, co-curator of the exhibition, “but there is still much to go.”
       At that time, the museum also had a parallel exhibition of the artist Eva Hesse, who also fled Hamburg on a children’s train carrying Jewish children.
        Kelle said she doesn’t think Gego’s Jewishness contributed to her lateness in Germany, noting that since the 1990s, researchers have been more actively looking for information about German Jewish artists refugees from World War II. However, “there is also a certain degree of shame,” she said. The 2013 exhibit also featured a plaque commemorating Gego, which was installed by a city official in her former home.
        Gego working on the Chorros installation at the Barquisimeto Museum, 1985. Courtesy of LGDR, photo by Tony Russell.
        The Goldschmidt family has been running the J. Goldschmidt Sohn bank since 1815. Gego, the sixth of seven children, was the last to leave the family villa in Hamburg. Deciding to wait until she graduated as an architect, she donated the house’s furniture to charity at the last minute, locked the front door, and threw the key into the Ulster River.
        “Looking back, it was risky [to stay that long]. It was the same risk in Venezuela, barely knowing where it was on the map,” Gunz said. “Someone has to be last.”
        Gego was allowed to enter Venezuela from the UK, where her immediate family found temporary shelter. In Venezuela, as a woman and a foreigner, she struggled to find work in construction and married Ernst Gunz in 1940. Together they opened a wooden furniture design studio. The couple had two children, Thomas and Barbara. In 1951 they separated and Gego met her life partner Gerd Leifert.
        Gego’s late discovery in North America and Europe is due to the fact that she was a Latin American artist who, unlike some of her well-known peers in the Venezuelan postmodern scene, chose to stay in Caracas rather than pay more. time in art capitals like Paris or New York. Not being represented by a major commercial gallery is another matter.
        LGDR has housed Gego’s work in institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi, and says it has generated interest from many museums, especially since the artist has few large-scale works to sell. Prices for etchings range from $20,000, works on paper $50,000 to $100,000, and bulk works $250,000. A rare freestanding Chorro sold for just over $1.5 million.
        Gego did spend a short time in America. In the 60s she worked at the Pratt Institute in New York, then studied pedagogy at the University of California at Berkeley and engraving at the Tamarind lithographic studio in Los Angeles. In 1965, the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited and purchased her Esfera (Spheres) grid, and in 1971 she exhibited her Los Chorros series in a solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York.
        “Had she stayed longer, like other Latin American artists who moved to the US, she might have received more recognition,” her son said. “But that wasn’t her goal at the time. Venezuela was so alive [in terms of] artistic life that she thought it was happening there.” He added: “She didn’t want to be famous.”
        This may be true, but Gego’s granddaughter Esther also wonders if the world needs more time to catch up with Gego. “Perhaps we were not ready to learn about her work until now,” she said.
       © Artnet Worldwide Corporation, 2022 г. isnewsletter = pagetypeurl.includes(“?page_1″); w = pagetype + 20 * Math.round(w / 20), h = pagetype + 20 * Math.round(h / 20), googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().setTargeting(“width”, w), googletag.pubads().setTargeting(“height”, h), 1 == isnewsletter && googletag.pubads().setTargeting(“isfirstpage”, ['Y', pagetypeforce] ) }); w = тип страницы + 20 * Math.round(w/20), h = тип страницы + 20 * Math.round(h/20), googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().setTargeting(“width “, w), googletag.pubads().setTargeting(“высота”, h), 1 == isnewsletter && googletag.pubads().setTargeting(“isfirstpage”, ['Y', pagetypeforce] ) }); w = pagetype + 20 * Math.round(w / 20), h = pagetype + 20 * Math.round(h / 20), googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().setTargeting(“宽度”, w), googletag.pubads().setTargeting(“height”, h), 1 == isnewsletter && googletag.pubads().setTargeting(“isfirstpage”, ['Y', pagetypeforce] ) }); w = тип страницы + 20 * Math.round(w/20), h = тип страницы + 20 * Math.round(h/20), googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().setTargeting(“宽度”, w), googletag.pubads().setTargeting(“высота”, h), 1 == isnewsletter && googletag.pubads().setTargeting(“isfirstpage”, ['Y', pagetypeforce] ) }); (function defernl() { if (window.jQuery) { if (jQuery(window).width() > 619) { setTimeout(function() { var cookieSettings = { recentlyShown: { expiration_minutes: 5 }, signedUp: { expiration_days: 14 }, closedSignupBar: { expiration_days: 5 } }; var generalSettings = { loadFontAwesome: false }; if (!window.jQuery) loadJQuery(); var $ = window.jQuery; function addCss(fileName) { var head = document.head , link = document.createElement(‘link’); link.type = ‘text/css’; link.rel = ‘stylesheet’; link.href = fileName; head.appendChild(link); } function appendNewsletterSignup() { var signup = ” //hide on mobile phones + ‘ @media (max-width: 575px){ #ouibounce-modal {display:none !important;} }’ + ‘ @media (max-width: 767px){ .close-signup {top:0 !important;} }’ + ‘ @media (max-width: 1199px){ #ouibounce-modal .description {font-size:13px !important;} }’ + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ‘Get hand-picked stories from our editors delivered straight to your inbox every day.’ + ” + ” + (функция defernl() { if (window.jQuery) { if (jQuery(window).width() > 619) { setTimeout(function() { var cookieSettings = { недавно показано: { expire_minutes: 5 }, signedUp: { expire_days: 14 }, ClosedSignupBar: {дней_истечения: 5} }; var generalSettings = {loadFontAwesome: false}; if (!window.jQuery) loadJQuery(); var $ = window.jQuery; function addCss(fileName) { var head = document. head , link = document.createElement(‘link’); link.type = ‘text/css’; link.rel = ‘stylesheet’; link.href = fileName; head.appendChild(link); } function appendNewsletterSignup() { var signup = ” // скрыть на мобильных телефонах + ‘ @media (max-width: 575px){ #ouibounce-modal {display:none !important;} }’ + ‘ @media (max-width: 767px){ . close-signup {top:0 !important;} }’ + ‘ @media (max-width: 1199px){ #ouibounce-modal .description {font-size:13px !important;} }’ + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ‘Каждый день получайте тщательно отобранные истории от наших редакторов прямо на ваш почтовый ящик.’ + ” + ” + (function defernl() { if (window.jQuery) { if (jQuery(window).width() > 619) { setTimeout(function() { var cookieSettings = { recentlyShown: { expiration_minutes: 5 }, signedUp: { expiration_days: 14 }, closedSignupBar: { expiration_days: 5 } }; var generalSettings = { loadFontAwesome: false }; if (!window.jQuery) loadJQuery(); var $ = window.jQuery; function addCss(fileName) { var head = document. head, link = document.createElement(‘link’); link.type = ‘text/css’; link.rel = ‘stylesheet’; link.href = fileName; head.appendChild(link); } function appendNewsletterSignup() { var signup = ” //在手机上隐藏 + ‘ @media (max-width: 575px){ #ouibounce-modal {display:none !important;} }’ + ‘ @media (max-width: 767px){ . close-signup {top:0 !important;} }’ + ‘ @media (max-width: 1199px){ #ouibounce-modal .description {font-size:13px !important;} }’ + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ‘从我们的编辑那里获取每天直接发送到您的收件箱的精选故事。’ + ” + ” + (функция defernl() { if (window.jQuery) { if (jQuery(window).width() > 619) { setTimeout(function() { var cookieSettings = { недавно показано: { expire_minutes: 5 }, signedUp: { expire_days: 14 }, ClosedSignupBar: {дней_истечения: 5} }; var generalSettings = {loadFontAwesome: false}; if (!window.jQuery) loadJQuery(); var $ = window.jQuery; function addCss(fileName) { var head = document. head, link = document.createElement(‘link’); link.type = ‘text/css’; link.rel = ‘stylesheet’; link.href = fileName; head.appendChild(link); } function appendNewsletterSignup() { var signup = ” //在手机上隐藏 + ‘ @media (max-width: 575px){ #ouibounce-modal {display:none !important;} }’ + ‘ @media (max-width: 767px){ . close-signup {top:0 !important;} }’ + ‘ @media (max-width: 1199px){ #ouibounce-modal .description {font-size:13px !important;} }’ + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ‘从我们的编辑那里获取每天直接发送到您的收件箱的精选故事。’ + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ‘请输入有效的电子邮件地址’ + ” + ” + ‘注册失败。 请稍后再试。’ + ” + ” + ” + ” + ‘ ‘ + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ” + ‘感谢您的订阅！’ + ” + ‘
        You are currently logged into this Artnet News Pro account on another device. Log out from any other device and reload this page to continue. To find out if you are eligible to subscribe to the Artnet News Pro group, contact [email protected]. Standard subscriptions can be purchased from the subscriptions page.