Gego, lines for knowledge

Madrid,

Born in Germany and trained in architecture and engineering in Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, the current University of that city, Gertrud Goldschmidt, which is familiar to us as a gego, was forced to leave his country when he had not reached thirty, in 1939, before the Nazi ascent and the imminent war; She belonged to a Jewish family. It was established in Venezuela, where the rest of his life would reside and where, already in 1953, he undertook an artistic career that would last four decades and that materialized in projects in two and three dimensions and in diverse techniques, but always based on the study of the relations between space, line and volume.

That trajectory reviews it, from a selection of its drawings but also with four sculptures, the Elvira González gallery in a precisely called “line, form and space” sample, which deepens its use of those elements with a desire for knowledge without the possibility of closing: There is no danger of getting stuck because with each line I draw, there are hundreds more waiting to be drawn. That is the circle of knowledge with its ring around, it enlarges the inner circle and the exterior becomes bigger, endless.

Gego. Line, shape and space. Elvira González Gallery

We must remember, however, that Gego’s creative work did not fit the plastic, since he carried out research, design and educational projects, and that it is complicated Architecture and Urban Planning Studies of Caracas, during the forties. We talk about figurations in the form of representations of landscapes and architectural forms.

The forms, lines and pure colors, and the geometric ordinations, which were in the fifties the seal of Venezuelan abstraction and the bases of the language of the kinetic art well rooted in that country would be their own; The sculptures and works on paper in which he worked between the mid -fifty and mid parallel lines and with its structural and spatial possibilities. The use of that element, the line, freely or compressed, is the basis of its concept of “nothing between the lines”, which served to explore the idea of making visible the invisible in different drawings of those years.

Very shortly after, in the sixties, it would undertake its experiments with the optical effects of oscillation and vibration, in short, of light and movement in space, in sculptures normally made with iron soldier and painted and composed of parallel tubular elements that, in turn, give rise to geometric planes that overlap or cross. If we observe them from different points of view, we will appreciate the dynamism they generate.

The sixties were also, for her, a period of frequent trips to the United States, where she moved for the first time in 1959. In 1963 and 1966 she was invited to the Tamarind lithography workshop of Los Angeles, where she could develop a significant set of prints and artist books in which she continued to investigate the relations between the line, the shape and space in those new techniques; He used gofrado, engraving, etching and lithography. In addition, the end of that decade was a turn in his career: he stopped delving into the parallel lines to focus on the Reticuláreas; Thus, Gego referred to grid -shaped structures in two and three dimensions; One of them, just 1969, can be contemplated in Elvira González.

Perhaps the chapter of his production for which we remember today his figure are his hanging sculptures, where he sought to synthesize another fundamental notion in his career: that of Infinite measuredexpression contained in Alfredo Silva Estrada’s poem Variations on reticuláreasin turn raised as a tribute to Gego; It refers to the symbolic limitations of this infinite space based on the artist’s own forms.

For its interwoven lines, we can relate these projects to their textiles, a discipline that was continually present in his career more or less explicitly. He worked on them, in their design and patterns, especially from fifty to the eighties, but before, in the forties, the carpets were already part of their workshop.

Among Gego’s most complex creations are Paperless drawings of the seventies and eighty; These are minimalist sculptures designed with wire, recycled metal and small hardware that hang from the ceiling or the walls as if they were drawn, even if they lack paper and frame. They offered other possibilities to modulate space and, also, to question the autonomy of the sculpture by subordinating it to the walls; Those that have arrived in Madrid present diverse developments, and also different materials: steel, copper, bronze, metal unions.

If their first pieces of this type charged empty square or rectangular frames, subsequently introduced circular structures and deformed or broken reticles, through geometric compositions of interrupted linear patterns. In the last, intimate format, he eliminated, in fact, all framing and resorted to frayed lines in Zigzag.

His latest works in the exhibition date from the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties: they have arrived in Madrid Weejurasin which he used knots and networks by compising the vocabulary developed throughout his career.