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Lot Essay
“There is no danger for me to get stuck,” Gego once reflected, “because with each line I draw, hundreds more wait to be drawn” (“Testimony 4,” in Sabiduras and Other Texts by Gego, ed. M.E. Huizi and J. Manrique, Houston, 2005, p. 171). Trained as an architect and engineer in Germany, Gego renewed her artistic practice in Venezuela beginning in the mid-1950s, moving within the orbit of the postwar avant-garde coalescing around Alejandro Otero and Jesús Soto and their practices of geometric and kinetic abstraction. Adapting the constructivist principles that she had earlier studied at the Bauhaus and the example of artists such as Joseph Albers and Paul Klee, she embarked on new experiments with line, probing the architectonics of space in between two and three dimensions. Her practice encompassed breakthroughs in sculpture, from the vertically cascading Chorros and Troncos to modular webs of room-sized Reticuláreas, as well as prolific drawings both with and (radically) without paper. The critically acclaimed retrospective Gego: Measuring Infinity opened in March 2023 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and will travel this fall to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Gego is represented in major collections worldwide, among them the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Tate Modern (London).
Gego began to experiment with paperless constructions as early as 1969, but not until 1976 did she stop drawing on paper altogether. Suspended at a slight distance from the wall, her Drawings without Paper articulate space and light through lattices of stainless-steel wires and metal scraps knit together in airy, semi-geometric constructions. An open, rectilinear grid supports the present Dibujo sin papel, anchoring the tripartite metal ribbon that juts and twists into space. The work contrasts the materiality of metal—iron and steel in varying colors and shapes—with the immateriality of the shadows cast against the wall, the reflected forms flickering in the light. “I discovered the charm of the line in and of itself—the line in space as well as the line drawn on the surface, and the nothing between the lines and the sparkling when they cross, when they are interrupted, when they are of different colors or different types,” Gego explained. “I discovered that sometimes the in-between lines [are] as important as the line by itself” (ibid., p. 170). In her Drawings without Paper, she gives visibility to these interstitial, and conceptually infinite spaces cultivated in and through the lines, subtly shaping transparency and light. The suppleness and elasticity of her twisted and angled lines, oscillating ever so slightly in the air, conjure new volumes out of the grid, expanding and equilibrating the synergy of “in-between lines” and the spaces everywhere around them.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Gego began to experiment with paperless constructions as early as 1969, but not until 1976 did she stop drawing on paper altogether. Suspended at a slight distance from the wall, her Drawings without Paper articulate space and light through lattices of stainless-steel wires and metal scraps knit together in airy, semi-geometric constructions. An open, rectilinear grid supports the present Dibujo sin papel, anchoring the tripartite metal ribbon that juts and twists into space. The work contrasts the materiality of metal—iron and steel in varying colors and shapes—with the immateriality of the shadows cast against the wall, the reflected forms flickering in the light. “I discovered the charm of the line in and of itself—the line in space as well as the line drawn on the surface, and the nothing between the lines and the sparkling when they cross, when they are interrupted, when they are of different colors or different types,” Gego explained. “I discovered that sometimes the in-between lines [are] as important as the line by itself” (ibid., p. 170). In her Drawings without Paper, she gives visibility to these interstitial, and conceptually infinite spaces cultivated in and through the lines, subtly shaping transparency and light. The suppleness and elasticity of her twisted and angled lines, oscillating ever so slightly in the air, conjure new volumes out of the grid, expanding and equilibrating the synergy of “in-between lines” and the spaces everywhere around them.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park