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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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 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by him, which in turn belong to the group of those provided by designer Álvaro Sotillo from the maquette of an unpublished book and those found in the Gerd Leufert archive.
An installation conceived by Álvaro Sotillo, with 8 unpublished nenias cut out in baquelite as well as 12 photographs belonging to the series “Las Nenias de Gerd Leufert” by Ricardo Armas, was exhibited in Building 6 of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.
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.
During 2013-2014 Gego’s oeuvre was shown for the first time in an individual exhibition in Germany and England. A large variety of pieces, inks and watercolors, engravings, weavings, drawings without paper and three-dimensional works of small and monumental format were exhibited in a carefully curated exhibition of Gego’s artistic trajectory.
The exhibition Gego: Line as object was the result of the joint effort of three great museums: Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England. The curators, Brigitte Kolle and Petra Roettig, Eva Marina Froitzheim and Lisa Lefevbre respectively, designed this project with the support of Fundación Gego in Caracas. It started out on November 29th in Hamburg, continued in March in Stuttgart and ended in October 2014 in Leeds.
Directed by filmmaker Nathalie David, the documentary film Gego was projected for the first time at the Kino Abaton, an arthouse film movie theater in Hamburg. Gego’s work and the different scenarios of her life, Hamburg and Caracas, are shown in this fine documentary which reunites the testimonies of the museum curators Brigitte Kolle, Petra Roettig, Eva Marina Froitzheim and Lisa Lefevre who organized the exhibition Gego, Line as Object. Director Nathalie David also interviewed relatives, friends, pupils and Venezuelan critics who were close to Gego and connoisseurs of her oeuvre.
The script of the film was based on Gego’s writings contained in the book “Sabiduras”. Each interviewee began by interpreting a thought of the artist in order to comment their personal experience and vision of Gego’s oeuvre in their generational context or in the context of art in Venezuela and the world.
The film was shown several times in the cities where the exhibition was held. It was projected in Paris, in Caracas and now it is being shown in several documentary film festivals about art.
This book was presented under the auspices of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Fundación GEGO. It contains all the texts which have appeared during the over forty years since Gego’s work Reticulárea was created. Compiled by María Elena Huizi and Ester Crespin under the editorship of MariCarmen Ramírez and Melina Kervandjian, this book unveils the great impact of Reticulárea on the most important spheres of international art. The book was presented in Houston, USA, in November 2013 and in Caracas in April 2014.
From a selection of graphic works in the collection of Fundación de Museos Nacionales and those in the custody of Fundación Gego, the public could enjoy the results of Gego’s work in prestigious workshops such as the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, California, as well as Gego’s contribution to the knowledge and execution of different techniques at the Taller de Artistas Gráficos Asociados (TAGA) in Caracas. It was also an opportunity to enjoy some of her drawings, inks and watercolors.
According to its curator, Constanza de Rogatis, the proposal of this exhibition “Gego sobre papel. El Trazo Transparente” “surges from the idea of finding out how the characteristics of the various techniques determined Gego’s approach to the work in her drawings and graphic works. Thus, the artist would develop groups of pieces in which the alternation of shapes, matter and color would unveil rich and surprising variants according to the characteristics of each medium, while being faithful to the search for transparence, a constant in the corpus of her work.
The International Association of Art Critics, Venezuelan chapter, endowed the exhibition Gego, Procedencia y Encuentro, organized by Fundación Gego and Sala Mendoza and curated by Josefina Manrique which took place between May and August 2012, with the prize AICA 2012 for best individual exhibition of small/medium format. The event took place on May 27th 2013.