Gego’s spatial drawings bolster our imagination beyond measure

Both in dramatic contrast—gentle transparency against monumental solidity—and unanimity—boundless airiness and sheer lightness—Guggenheim’s iconic spiral serves the stage for a comprehensive lifework survey of Gego. The German-Venezuelan artist invented her name by putting together two first letters of her first and last names, Gertrud Goldschmidt: Gego.

The Guggenheim Museum’s major retrospective, Gego: Measuring Infinity presents her sweeping oeuvre through September 10. On display are more than 200 items: drawings, prints, textiles, paper weavings, photographs, publications, letters, and, most importantly, sculptures. Except that these are not sculptures in the traditional sense. In fact, Gego intended to create something entirely original, geometric abstractions that would defy any preconception. In one of her notebooks, she wrote, "Sculpture: Three-dimensional forms of solid material. NEVER WHAT I DO!” Gego’s three-dimensional compositions are made of steel, iron, aluminum, copper, lead, bronze, plastic, and nylon. They are lines that playfully connect and pull away in the artist’s ceaseless experiments with structure, space, light and shadow.  

Gertrud Goldschmidt was born into a large Jewish banking family in Hamburg, Germany in 1912. She studied architecture and engineering at the University of Stuttgart, graduating in 1938. The following year she emigrated from Nazi Germany to Venezuela, the only country that would grant her a visa. Shortly after, her parents closed the family bank and together with Gertrud’s six siblings—she was the second oldest—left the country, eventually settling in England and California. Goldschmidt restarted her life in Caracas by initially working as an architect. In 1940 she met the German businessman Ernst Gunz whom she later married and with whom she had two children. With her husband’s support, Goldschmidt created the Gunz workshop with a focus on designing and fabricating furniture and lamps. In 1948 she built two houses in Caracas, one of them for her family. However, in 1952 the couple separated. The same year Gego became a Venezuelan citizen and met Gerd Leufert, a graphic designer who immigrated to Venezuela from Germany one year earlier. They became life partners.

Roughly from the time she met Gerd Leufert, Gego devoted her efforts to artmaking—initially creating traditional watercolors of landscapes, then switching to abstract etchings and engravings dealing with flat planes of parallel equidistant lines that would occasionally cross. Eventually, she expanded by experimenting with a variety of distorted and superimposed grids expressed in a limited colour palette. In 1956, Gego started working on her three-dimensional works. She began teaching design and architecture, the activity to which she devoted almost 20 years of her life. She also studied and took part in workshops at several universities in the United States. By 1969 she became fully committed to producing wire sculptures, particularly modulated nets, which constitute the main bulk of the Guggenheim show. 

The works featured here unravel chronologically from the bottom up, starting from watercolours and prints to Gego’s remarkable wire sculptures. Yet, this linear order gets constantly broken due to the wonderful spatiality of the building’s main rotunda. We keep an eye on what stays behind and can’t help but catch glimpses of what still awaits ahead. If we start from the bottom—I always walk up and then come down to see the whole show in reverse again—the survey opens with the double-height space called High Gallery where the largest and most striking pieces are gathered. These see-through structures are shaped into nets, columns, trunks, and globes. The latter ones come in a cluster of seven interconnected globes and a few scattered one by one. Many of these pieces have no titles.

Together they make up what the artist called Reticulárea—a combination of two words: reticule (net) and area, an area of nets, or simply networks, somewhat reminiscent of spiderwebs. No doubt these works must have inspired the web-like landscapes created by Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno. Gego’s constructions also evoke such architectural works as Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Domes and frame systems for the enormous, cantilevered aircraft hangars that German American architect Konrad Wachsmann designed for the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s and ‘60s.

The very first Reticulárea by Gego, a large-scale, site-specific work, was exhibited in the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas in 1969. It is widely considered the artist’s magnum opus. The work was repeatedly modified by Gego in successive installations, each by her own hands for a specific environment, including later that year at the Center for Inter-American Relations (now Americas Society) in  New York which many years later, in 2012, hosted another one of her exhibition.

Although the Guggenheim show is by far the largest presentation of Gego’s works ever held in the United States, the current U.S. sanctions against Venezuela prevented the museum from borrowing dozens of prominent works by Gego from the collection of the Fundación Museos Nacionales in Caracas. Many of the works in the show come from all over the world, most notably from the Fundación Gego that Tomas Gunz and Barbara Gunz established in Caracas following their mother’s death in 1994. Other major collection  that lent their works to the Guggenheim include the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston which held Gego’s first U.S. retrospective in 2002.

Gego’s net installations are assemblies of malleable modulated square and triangular meshes made out of  stainless steel, aluminum, copper, or bronze wires. Composed of both vertical and horizontal meshes these structures are either suspended from the ceiling or self-supported. The semi-open High Gallery is the only place in the exhibition where visitors can immerse themselves in experiencing Gego’s geometric “airy drawings” quite literally by moving around at least some of the pieces. These ambient networks challenge the idea of center and one point of view; your vision is constantly shifted and the works in front of you are activated through careful observation.

Among this room’s 15 pieces from the 1970s and '80s stands out an 11-foot-tall, towering structure made up of a stack of roughly equally spaced square meshes, each horizontally positioned and curved slightly like a sea surface. The floating squares are fixed at their respective height in space at four corners to wires that come down from the ceiling. These barely visible vertical lines are brought into tension by dark lead weights hovering just above a shallow floor platform. This monumental, yet delicate work, titled Column came from the collection of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

Other highlights of the show include smaller-scale wire pieces—intersecting squares, spheres within cubes, spheres within spheres, and a variety of trunks marching up the ramp. These enigmatic structures that at times look almost organic, some move as if they are breathing, invite visitors to stare deep inside to explore spaces that seem infinite and immeasurable unlike the title of the show suggests. These delicate sculptures are reminiscent of some of the works of American sculptor Ruth Asawa, although Gego’s pieces are much more irregular and adventurous. Once you feel you figured her out, she will find ways to surprise us.

Her series Drawings without Paper is a case in point. These smaller-scale three-dimensional pieces that Gego worked on from 1976 to 1988 are hung without backgrounds directly against the wall making enthralling shadows an integral part of these artworks. Apart from metal rods and wires, they incorporate whatever materials happened to be around at the artist’s studio—parts of hardware, blocks of wood, hangers, pieces of bright-colored plastic, and threads. There is playful randomness and humour in these ambiguous, clever, and whimsical works.   

Among the smallest and most intricate works in the show are paper weavings which were done by Gego in the last few years of her life when she could no longer work on her wire pieces. Made from interwoven strips of paper that include magazine pages, flyers, and reproductions of the artist’s own work, they bring to mind experiments by such Venezuelan Op Art and geometric abstraction artists as Carlos Cruz-Diez, Alejandro Otero, and Jesús Rafael Soto. These exploratory collages even echo the 1980s colorful maze video game graphics. The one called Weaving 88/8 is particularly striking for its representation of one of Gego’s own constellation-like Reticulárea seemingly bursting through an array of pink and red pixel-like rectangles and squares. Its implicit three-dimensionality celebrates artistic creativity that’s truly boundless. Gego’s volumetric and flat pieces bolster our imagination beyond measure.