A selection of 22 three-dimensional works: reticuláreas, streams, spheres and trunks of Gego are exhibited for the first time in Paris as part of the exhibition Southern Geometries, from Mexico to Patagonia. Organized by the Foundation Cartier pour lart contemporain, the exhibition brings together the works of 70 Latin American artists, from pre-Columbian to contemporary times. The exhibition will be open to the public from October 14, 2018 to February 24, 2019
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The exhibition “Gego: Autobiography of a Line” opened on May 25th in Dominique Lévy Gallery in London. This was the second of a pair of exhibitions celebrating the legacy of the German-born Venezuelan artista Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt) [1912 – 1994]. Organized in collaboration with Fundación Gego, this is the first individual exhibition of the artist in London. It includes a selection of her work, and in particular, three monumental sculptures made in the 70s, which incarnate the palpable sensation of geometry and the spatial play which characterizes Gego’s work. There is also a selection of drawings in ink on paper and later works which explicit the relation between drawing and sculpture, such as Dibujos sin papel (Drawings without paper), Watercolors and Weavings. The exhibition includes loans from the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) and Fundación Gego. The exhibition closed on August 19th, 2016.
Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016, an exhibition made in the recently opened building of Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel gallery in Los Angeles, brought together the works of 34 women artists, among whom Gego was included. http://www.hauserwirthschimmel.com/exhibitions/past
The perstigious Dominique Lévy Gallery in New York presented the public with a selection of works by GEGO, curated by Jesús Fuenmayor and Sandra Antelo-Suárez.
A special publication was edited for the occasion, with texts by the curators and critics of Latin American art Sandra Antelo-Suárez and Jesús Fuenmayor and by Chus Martínez, director of the Institute of Art of the Academy of Arts and Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst) in Basel, Switzerland, and Kaira Cabañas, art critic and historian. It also includes the unpublished poem “Gego”, written by the poet and visual artist Anne Tardos.
The exhibition showed some 70 works belonging to public and private collections, lent for the occasion. It is important to point out the series Chorros (Streams), belonging to the Fundación de Museos Nacionales – Museum of Barquisimeto, which was exhibited together with other pieces from the same series in an assembly which reminded of the installation made in 1971 by the artist herself at the Betty Parson Gallery in New York. The Chorros are a series of structures made of metal rods made by Gego in 1970-71 which hang vertically from the ceiling to the ground resembling waterfalls. Pieces from other series, such as Drawings without paper, Inks, Weavings and Bichitos (Little Beasts), were also shown, coming from other prestigious collections such as Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Mercantil Collection, Cisneros- Fontanals, Fundación Gego and other private collectors.
The exhibition was researched and curated by Carmen Alicia Di Pasquale, who refers to the artist in the following terms: “Leufert presents himself, more tan as an eclectic artista or a designer with artistic ambitions, as a visual thinker, someone who reflecte don his time and his life as an emigrant, from and with the image, even if this does not translate into a realistic or social discourse, but rather into the research of essential and not necessarily evident structures and forms.”
“Mundo Nenia. Gerd Leufert 1914-2014” is the result of a process of research which included, as part of the simple, all the nenias that had been published by their creator in print and events as well as those not published by him, which in turn belong to the group of those provided by designer Álvaro Sotillo from the maquette of an unpublished book and those found in the Gerd Leufert archive.
An installation conceived by Álvaro Sotillo, with 8 unpublished nenias cut out in baquelite as well as 12 photographs belonging to the series “Las Nenias de Gerd Leufert” by Ricardo Armas, was exhibited in Building 6 of Oficina #1.
In Building 9 “Archivo Nenia 2015. Una reconstrucción” was exhibited. This was made up of 162 figures drawn on digital platform under the direction of Gabriela Fontanillas and then cut out in vinyl on mdf and melamine support and marked with a corpus of some two thousand referential data.
Gerd Leufert used the name “Nenias” to identify a series of figures he started to develop as a theme in the early sixties. The conventional meaning of the term comes from music, where it refers to certain very old songs or lamentations which belonged to funerary rites. This remains as a trace of the deeply enigmatic carácter of Leufert’s visual creations.
The exhibition provided the framework for a series of encounters, conversations, concert and poetry.
The Henry Moore Institute, in the British city of Leeds, is well known as a center dedicated to the study, documentary archive and exhibition of sculpture. It is part of the Henry Moore Foundation, created in 1977 by the great British sculptor.
Gego’s exhibition made its third and last stop in the HMI. Its director, Lisa Lefevbre, one of the curators of the exhibition, explained her special interest in Gego’s oeuvre.
This show underlined Gego’s visionary approach to sculpture, a term she herself refused to use for her work. In one of her testimonies the artist expressed: “Sculpture, three-dimensional forms of solid material. Never what I make.”
The selection of works for this exhibition covered the artist’s creation of 34 years, from 1957 when she started developing her thoughts on sculpture with the work Vibración en negro (Vibration in black). In Lisa Lefevbre’s words, this torso of continuous form in black painted aluminum hanging from the ceiling softly responds to the air’s movement and distributes its volume through its shadows. The last works are dated 1991, when Gego concentrated on her Tejeduras (Weavings), interwoven paper strips which combine reproductions of her own works with pages from magazines and cigarette pack strips, and on Bichitos (Little beasts), small format assemblies made from materials available in her immediate surroundings. Between those two points in time Gego created large-scale nets, columns and spheres which filled the galleries, drawings without paper as well as watercolors, drawings in ink and engravings.
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart rises in the center of the city since 2005: a cubic concrete structure which hosts an important collection of German and international artists. From March 29 to June 29 it hosted the exhibition Gego. Line as object.
Gego spent her student years in Stuttgart (1932-1938), where she studied and graduated as an engineer with a specialization in architecture at the Technische Hochschule (nowadays part of the University of Stuttgart). In 1939 she emigrated to Venezuela, where she worked as a teacher and developed her plastic work.
We had the opportunity of visiting the documentary center of the university, where we were welcomed by its director, Dr. Norbert Becker, who showed us a series of documents referring to Gego’s academic record at the university. He showed us her registration form and explained that the yellow color referred to her condition as a Jew and the diagonal red strip across it meant that she was a female student. He also showed us images of the building destroyed during WWII.
In her text in the catalogue of the exhibition, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart curator Eva Marina Froitzheim mentions that the artist “makes use of her knowledge of Mathematics and her training as an architect to develop her geometric forms, exploring the physical conditions of concrete space in graphic work as well as in sculpture.”
The text of the museum’s website signals that Gego centers mainly on the line as a means of expression, and her work explores the creative relationship between space and the line. It also says that for five decades she worked on the idea of converting the line into an object as she used it to create planes, volumes and structures of extended nets.
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart conceived this project to present it simultaneously with Luisa Richter’s exhibition, also a German-born Venezuelan artist.
This exhibition was presented under the curatorship of Ruth Auerbach. In its preparation she had to uncover pieces which were treasured in private collections and search in archives and memoirs of people who were close to the artist. Thus she achieved to complete a sample of 43 works which support the artist’s argumentation on the void square as a subject of research which led him to the creation of these singular pieces called “Listonados”. Aixa Díaz designed a catalogue with text by Ruth Auerbach for the occasion.
Gego was born in 1912 in the harbour city of Hamburg. The family abandoned their home on Heilwigstrasse 40 because of the nazi threat. Her parents and siblings were forced to emigrate. Gego was the last one to leave; she locked the door and threw the key into the Alster river.
At the end of November Hamburg already displays the lights of the Christmas markets surrounding the bay. We walked to the museum to attend the opening of the exhibition. The Hamburger Kunsthalle received us with an enormous billboard featuring an image of Gego, open arms lifted to the skies, which covered the facade.
Simultaneously, the museum presented the work of Eva Hesse, also a Hamburg-born artist, well known for her work developed in the United States.
When entering the museum there were posters and signs inviting to the exhibition. We entered the halls and recognized the works. We have seen them many times and the emotion we feel gets stronger every time.
The press conference started; journalists, writers, art bloggers, critics and next of kin listened to the curators of the exhibition:
“Her delicate objects, structured like rhizomes of metal and wire, defied the traditional definition of sculpture as a closed mass and volume. Gego also pursued transparency and lightness in her numerous works on paper where she employed lines as objects. Her innovative and experimental approach to sculpture and to “drawings in space” had an important influence on subsequent generations of artists in Latin America, leaving her imprint on contemporary art beyond Venezuela.”
Gego’s relatives and friends visited her former house. The deputy mayoress of Hamburg, Dorothee Stapelfeldt, unveiled a plaque on the wall surrounding the front garden which reads:
In this house lived
GERTRUD GOLDSCHMIDT DEHN
Known as Gego
From August 1st 1912 until 1939
The artist Gertrud Goldschmidt Dehn, known as GEGO, was born on August 1st, 1912, sixth child of the Jewish family Goldschmidt. In 1932 she started her studies of Architecture at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. Because of the constant menace of the national socialists, Gego emigrated via England to Venezuela, where she started to work as an artist. Her great web-like installations were not conceived as sculptures but as drawings in space. On September 17th, 1994 Gego died in Caracas at the age of 82. Nowadays Gego is one of the most renowned artists of South America.
Fundación Gego, together with other institutions such as Sala TAC, Museo Carlos Cruz Diez, Editorial Exlibris, as well as friends like Javier Aizpurua, Ruth Auerbach, Lourdes Blanco, Álvaro Sotillo, Gabriela Fontanillas and others, commemorated Lithuanian-born artist Gerd Leufert’s 100th birthday. Exhibitions, conferences and publications were some of the activities related to this tribute.
Leufert’s work, vast and diverse, is characterized by the simplicity of its images and the continuous experimentation with genres, techniques and color which he developed along his artistic trajectory.
Leufert was the great innovator of graphic design in Venezuela; teacher of several generations of designers, artists and printers. Gego was his special disciple; he stimulated her to start out on the path of art and taught her the first techniques of graphic expression.
Known as the Father of Design in our country, Leufert was the creator of countless emblems, logotypes and typographical fonts. Leufert designed books and art catalogues, and in the 70s Caracas was one of the most avant-garde capitals of Latin America and the world in matters of design.