Like everything that surpasses us and lies beyond the reach of our will, Gego’s work seems to have neither beginning nor end. It appears capable of continuously growing and changing, of developing like vegetation, like all living forms, accepting and responding to the transformations and imperfections, the vicissitudes and accidents of life.
Exquisite in its painstaking detail and elegant simplicity, Dibujo sin papel (1985) is the largest work from Gego’s renowned series of “Drawings without Paper” ever to appear at international auction. Here, Gego has exactingly woven together an assemblage of found and intervened iron and steel wires and rods in a precarious balance. Rigidly squared lime-green and black iron bars and silvery beaded steel chains form a window around a delicate, sun-like wire orb, with tendrils extending outward in all directions. Sensitive to the slightest breeze, these fragile rays of wire remain in constant motion, tracing and re-tracing soft shadows on the wall and dynamic lines in the air. Dibujo sin papel, with its delicate geometry and expansive scale, offers a powerful testament to Gego’s radically innovative contribution to the history of twentieth-century abstraction.
Works by Gego in Important Institutional Collections
Known simply as Gego, Getrudis Goldschmidt was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1912 to a secular Jewish family. A graduate of the architecture and engineering programs of the prestigious Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, her early studies focused on Bauhaus and Russian Constructivist philosophies of art and architecture - a geometric and utopian framework that would echo through her later work. In 1938, shortly after her graduation, Gego was forced to flee Nazi persecution in Germany; unable to obtain a visa to join the rest of her family in England, she landed in the sleepy Venezuelan coastal town of Tarma.
By 1956 Gego settled in Caracas, Venezuela’s cosmopolitan capital. The site of great cultural flourishing during the post-war period (spurred in part by Venezuela’s oil boom and a government motivated to build a visual national identity), Caracas in the late 1950s was home to numerous modernist art and architecture projects of monumental scale and impact. The dominant visual language of this period was Cinetismo (Kineticism), spearheaded by Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Alejandro Otero - who sought to interrogate the relationship between art object and spectator through artworks with profoundly disorienting optical effects.
Gego’s line is not simply the bare stroke or simple link it appears to be. Even when it originates as a minimal mark on paper, it transforms itself organically into subtle matter or discriminating volume in an implied space. In this regard, Gego’s reticular constructions and paperless drawings not only bypass the commonplace notion of “representation” but in themselves suggest a theoretical “presentification” of line. As such, they encompass a perceptual dimension that transforms the sense of sight into that of touch and even balance.
Though Gego’s practice shared a similar commitment to the individual, meditative relationship between a viewer and a work of art, she radically opposed her contemporaries’ focus on color, optical processes, and phenomenology. Working independently for much of her career, Gego first attacked the orthogonal grid that underlies much of twentieth-century abstraction, creating her Reticulárea: a massive, improvisationally-composed installation of spiraling networks of wire. Here the “grid ”is turned constellation, opened into an infinite web of compositional possibilities.
Executed during the final decades of her life, Dibujo sin papel is an outstanding exemplar from this culminating series in her oeuvre. Crafted by hand and suspended from the wall by nearly-invisible monofilament, these delicate constructions in diverse combinations of steel and wire, hand-made and found elements, reveal their ephemeral materiality in the gentle shadows they cast against the wall. Artisanally and thoughtfully constructed of cast-off objects, acknowledging yet gently rejecting that purest and most artificial geometric form, the square, these works contain a multitude of elegant contradictions. In Dibujo sin papel, Gego’s unparalleled originality is in full force. By the mid-1980s, Gego had achieved an unprecedented degree of formal, conceptual and creative freedom. The present Dibujo sin papel, executed in 1985 at the peak of her artistic maturity, is one of the most accomplished works from this period to have been offered at auction.
