Fundación Gego is created

Fundación Gego is born as a family initiative in 1994 after Gego’s death. Barbara Gunz says: “We were lucky to have the support of Gego’s friends, especially Miguel Arroyo, who guided us in what was our first exhibition, Gego: dibujos, grabados, tejeduras in 1996. We started building a team of professionals in order to achieve the goals we had defined: the registry and classification of Gego’s works, their conservation and study.”

Gego’s oeuvre at the XXIII Sao Paulo Biennale

Gego’s oeuvre participated in the special halls of the XXIII Sao Paulo Biennale under the direction of the Venezuelan critic, writer and curator Roberto Guevara. According to Josefina Manrique, “this worked as a platform to rouse the interest of international curators. It is at this time that her work starts to be included in itinerant exhibitions which confront her with prestigious and renowned artists before new spectators.”

Drawings, Engravings and Tejeduras

This was the first individual exhibition after Gego’s death. A group of 119, so far unpublished, works on paper and twelve three-dimensional works were presented in the cultural spaces of Banco Consolidado. The sample was curated by Miguel Arroyo. A catalogue, containing a text by Eliseo Sierra, was published.

Inside the visible

Under the curatorship of Catherine de Zegher, this collective exhibition included works by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Lygia Clark, Mona Hatoum, Eva Hesse, Mira Schendel among others. The exhibition took place at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC; Whitechapel, London and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth.

Invención de la continuidad (Invention of continuity)

A collective exhibition at the Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas, under the curatorship of Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas and Ariel Jiménez. In the catalogue we can read the following: “…Its importance resides not only in having articulated an art of settings, subtly theatrical, with the most rigorous, although random, formal structures and the most precarious materials. Its importance resides, essentially, in doing this within the constructivist framework of our modern tradition. Gego would be a dissident of modernity who opens up the perspectives of contemporary art from within modernity itself.”

Re Alining Visions. Alternative currents in South American Drawing

This collective and itinerant exhibition counted on the curatorship of Mari Carmen Ramírez and Edith A. Gibson. It was shown in the following venues: Museo del Barrio in New York; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, Austin, Texas; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey and Miami Art Museum.

Campos de Fuerza: un ensayo sobre lo cinético (Force Fields: Phases of the kinetic)

Collective exhibition organized jointly by Museu de Art Contemponani de Barcelona and Hayward Gallery of London under the curatorship of Manuel Borja-Villel and Guy Brett. In his essay published in the catalogue of the exhibition Brett writes: “The objective transcription of a system of forces (with parallelisms in Physics, Biology and Engineering) is continually verified and challenged by a subjective and emotional imagination, especially at those points where these force lines meet and cross each other.”

Heterotopías: Medio siglo sin lugar 1918 – 1968 (Heterotopies: half a century without a place 1918-1968)

Collective exhibition organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía under the curatorship of Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea. It belongs to a group of five exhibitions that the museum calls “Versiones del Sur”, in which the different expressions of Latin American creation of the XX century are shown.

Gego. Obra Completa 1955-1990 (Gego. Complete oeuvre 1955-1990)

The great retrospective exhibition Gego. Obra Completa 1955-1990 opened in November 2000 in the Museo de Bellas Artes under the curatorship of Iris Peruga. A total of 394 works in the custody of Fundación Gego, from public and private collections, were exhibited in almost all the halls of the museum. A catalogue was published and almost three years later a bilingual book was published, containing critical texts by Iris Peruga, Luis Pérez Oramas, Mónica Amor, Ruth Auerbach and Josefina Núñez and a complete chronology set up by Guadalupe Montenegro. This volume, which was designed by Álvaro Sotillo, was published by Fundación Cisneros.

Symposium. Questioning the Line. Gego in her context

Critics Luis Pérez Oramas, Iris Peruga, Guy Brett, Richard Schiff and Mari Carmen Ramírez attended this one-day meeting, dedicated to critical thought and discussion about Gego’s oeuvre. It was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in the context of the sample which was shown there. The International Center for the Arts of the Americas, which belongs to the MFAH published a bilingual edition which collects the papers presented during this symposium.

Gego: Works on paper 1962 – 1991

This individual exhibition opened at the Latin Collector Art Center, New York. Twenty-nine works on paper by Gego were exhibited for sale. They were all sold. A bilingual catalogue with a text by Yolanda Pantin was published.

Thinking the Line: Ruth Vollmer and Gego

Under the curatorship of Nadja Rottner and Peter Weibel, a joint exhibition of these two artists was presented at the Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, Germany; the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, ZKM, Karlsruhe; Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria and in Miami Art Central, MAC, Miami, USA. Two books, one about each artist, were published.

Gego. Anudamientos (Gego. Knottings)

Sala Mendoza exhibited 260 photographs by Gabriela Fontanillas under the curatorship of Ruth Auerbach. A sample without any works by Gego was accompanied by a video directed by Luis Montenegro with music by Famasloop. In the catalogue, designed by Álvaro Sotillo and Gabriela, a text by Luis Pérez Oramas says: “What would Gego achieve with her knots but tie the movement of things to a new stillness?”

Sabiduras

Sabiduras, published in 2006, is a book which reproduces texts and thoughts by Gego related to her life and her work. Josefina Manrique and María Elena Huizi, the compilers, write: “In 1999, in a trunk that belonged to Gego and which she used as a filing cabinet, a sort of big, hand-made envelope was found. On its front, one handwritten word stood out. Sabiduras.” The book was published by the International Center for the Arts of the Americas of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Fundación Gego.

Gego. Between Transparency and the Invisible

Between Transparency and the Invisible, a large project organized by the MFAH under the curatorship of Mari Carmen Ramírez, had Gego’s works travelling to different cities for three years. It started out in the MFAH and then travelled to the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, MALBA. Then it continued to the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango in Bogotá and concluded in the Drawing Center in New York.

Gego Arquitecto (Gego architect)

Curated by architect Hannia Gómez, this exhibition reunited architectural projects created by Gego when she was a student in Stuttgart, her drawings and watercolors from Tarmas, and the monumental works of integration into architecture executed in different places in Caracas. It was shown in Trasnocho Arte Contacto, Sala TAC; Caracas; at Centro de Arte de Maracaibo Lía Bermúdez, Maracaibo; in Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, Ciudad Bolívar and at Galería Universitaria Braulio Salazar, UCV, Caracas.

Gego. Desafiando Estructuras (Gego. Defying structures)

Gego travelled to Europe for the first time with a large individual show. Under the guidance and watchful eye of Venezuelan curator Mónica Amor, Gego’s work was shown in a large individual exhibition at the Museu de Arte Contemporánea de Serralves, Oporto, Portugal and then at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain.

Frágil (Fragile)

This exhibition was shown in the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain, curated by José María Parreño. Some of the artists participating in this exhibition under the premise of the fragility of their works were: Robert Ryman (Nashville, 1930), Günter Haese (Kiel, 1924), Stanley Brown (Surinam, 1935), Waltercio Caldas (Río de Janeiro, 1946), Roger Ackling (1947), Andy Goldsworthy (Chesire, 1956), Rei Naito (Hiroshima,1961), Antoni Llena (Barcelona, 1942), Helen Maurer (Portsmouth, England).

Constructive Spirit. Abstract Art in South and North America 1920 – 1950

An exhibition containing works by 70 artists from Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela, it examined the geometric abstractionist movements of those countries. Starting out with the arrival of Joaquín Torres García in New York in 1920 until 1950, it explored the connections and exchanges between those artists: painters, sculptors, photographers and film-makers who brought new contributions to abstract language. It was shown at the Newark Museum, New Jersey, and the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, under the curatorship of Mary Kate O’Hare.

La Sombra del habla. MACBA. Seoul, Korea. (The shadow of speech. MACBA. Seoul, Korea)

Three works by Gego were shown at this exhibition of 150 pieces from MACBA’s fund at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul under the curatorship of Bartomeu Marí. The sample, which went under the title “La sombra del habla” (The shadow of speech), was composed by works by Spanish and international artists of different generations which demonstrate how breaking with the past of art has stimulated the birth of new creative traditions.

Vibración. Arte Moderno en América Latina (Vibration. Modern art in Latin America)

A collateral sample to the exhibition of the CIFO collection was shown in the Kunst und Ausstellungshalle in Germany. Pieces by Gego consisting of some graphic works, planes and some three-dimensional works were shown.

Erre. Variations Labyrinthiques

This exhibition, curated by Hélène de Guenin and Guillaume Désanges, opened at Centre Pompidou Metz, France. The curators used the model of the “labyrinth” and its notions of going astray, loss and wandering in contemporary art. The project was based on questions and displays related to contemporary problems such as topographic loss and spiritual elevation, confusion and enlightenment, anguish and revelation.

2012-1013 Gego’s centennial

Between 2012 and 2013 Fundación GEGO, together with other Venezuelan cultural institutions, organized the commemoration of the centennial of Gego’s (Gertrud Goldschmidt) birth with a wide program of exhibitions, book presentations, conferences, poetry recitals and workshops for children and adults. For this tribute, Álvaro Sotillo and Gabriela Fontanillas designed the graphic image which accompanied the whole program of events as well as all associated publications. Based on a 100-luminous-dot grid, the name GEGO can appear in one hundred different forms in a logotype which changes according to the format and taste of the user.

EXPOSICIÓN GEGO: COLECCIÓN MERCANTIL

A sample which included engravings, inks, drawings without paper and a large-format textile, all works belonging to the Banco Mercantil Collection, was shown from April 29th to August 5th, 2012 at Espacio Mercantil, Altamira, Caracas.

EXHIBITION GEGO: ORIGIN AND ENCOUNTER

“Origin and encounter”, a phrase which appears in one of the artist’s texts, condenses the essence of this exhibition curated by Josefina Manrique assisted by Mariana Reyes and Claudia Garcés. It was organized by Fundación Gego and Sala Mendoza and presented a selection of works by the artist which reveal points from which – through drawings- Gego started out on a particular line of research; an encounter which would serve, subsequently, as a basis for new processes of creation.

EXHIBITION GEGO IN THE 30th SAO PAULO BIENNALE

“Imminence of poetics” was the title of the 30th Sao Paulo Biennale which showed works of more than one hundred artists from all over the world. Curated by Luis Pérez Oramas, a selection of Tejeduras and Bichitos, works belonging to the last period of Gego’s work, were shown in this great exhibition.

Gego: Origin and Encounter, Mastering the Space

The Americas Society in New York, one of the few places where the Reticulárea was installed in 1969, hosted a sample which included works on paper, preparatory drawings, photographs, manuscripts, sketches and three-dimensional works by Gego. Curated by Josefina Manrique and Gabriela Rangel, this exhibition showed the trajectory that the artist followed, starting out with colorful landscapes and street scenes and progressing towards abstraction. It was organized by The Americas Society together with Fundación Gego and Sala Mendoza.

EXHIBITION Gego, obra abierta. Testimonios y vigencia (Gego, open work. Testimonies and validity)

This sample was organized by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo and curated by Fabiola Arroyo Poleo and Indira Aguilera Kohl with the consultancy of María Luz Cárdenas. It followed various correlations and aesthetic dialogues which evidence the open character of Gego’s oeuvre and its significant influx throughout time. It consisted of a selection of works by Gego and other recognized Venezuelan visual artists from the collection Fundación Museos Nacionales and a heterogeneous group of works from different invited contemporary artists.

GEGO AND JEWELERS

Project of study, research and creation in gold- and silversmithing. Coordinated by Josefina Núñez, the objective of this workshop was linking a plastic thought like Gego’s with contemporary gold- and silversmithing from the point of view of constructive concepts, technical forms, creative spirit and aesthetic expression. After the workshop an exhibition was organized with the works done in ARTKAO, Los Galpones.

EL NACIONAL: GEGO’S BIOGRAPHY

The book GEGO, written by María Elena Ramos, was published in the editorial series Biografías funded by El Nacional and Fundación Bancaribe. It narrates the life of the German-born Venezuelan artist and describes aspects of her prolific creative work.

CANCELLATION OF GEGO’S PLATES. TAGA

The process of cancellation of plates created by Gego was carried out with the support and participation of Taller de Artistas Gráficos Asociados TAGA in the person of printing master Norma Morales. Previously a series of ten copies from eighteen plates was posthumously printed. The act of cancellation of the master plates took place on April 10th 2013 in a public event the minutes of which were recorded. Afterwards a documentary video directed by Argelia Bravo was published.

EXHIBITION GEGO. TEJEDURAS, BICHITOS Y LIBROS (GEGO. WEAVINGS, LITTLE BEASTS AND BOOKS)

Fundación Telefónica, Fundación Gego and Periférico Centro de Arte Contemporáneo presented this exhibition curated by Félix Suazo. It contained 48 works belonging to the beginning and end of Gego’s artistic trajectory. The largest group of works was a selection of Tejeduras and Bichitos dated from 1987 to 1992. There were also some books of engravings in lithograph, etching and intaglio created by the artist between 1961 and 1967.

EXHIBITION Gego sobre papel. El Trazo Transparente. MUSEO CARLOS CRUZ DIEZ (Gego on paper. The transparent stroke)

From a selection of graphic works from the collection of Fundación de Museos Nacionales and those in custody at Fundación Gego, under the curatorship of Costanza de Rogatis, the public was invited to view the results of Gego’s incursions in prestigious workshops such as the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, California. It also allowed valuing Gego’s contribution to the knowledge and execution of different engraving techniques at the Taller de Artistas Gráficos in Caracas (TAGA).

DESENREDANDO LA RED. LA RETICULÁREA DE GEGO (UNTANGLING THE WEB, AN ANTHOLOGY OF CRITICAL RESPONSES)

The book DESENREDANDO LA RED. LA RETICULÁREA DE GEGO. UNA ANTOLOGÍA DE RESPUESTAS CRÍTICAS was published under the auspices of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Fundación Gego. It contains all the texts that have appeared in the over forty years of existence of Gego’s work Reticulárea. It was compiled by María Elena Huizi and Ester Crespin under the editorial care of Mari Carmen Ramírez and Melina Kervadjian.

GEGO BACK IN EUROPE

During the years 2013-2014 Gego’s work was shown for the first time, in a solo exhibition, in Germany and England. The exhibition Gego: Line as Object was the result of a joint effort of three important 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.

HAMBURG. THE RETURN HOME

Gego was born in the harbor city of Hamburg in 1912. The house where she lived with her family in Heilwigstrasse 40 had to be abandoned because of the nazi threat. Dorothee Stapelfeldt, deputy mayor of the city of Hamburg, unveiled a memorial plaque on the wall of the front garden of the house. This event took place as part of the activities surrounding the exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in November 2013.

GEGO’S LINE IN STUTTGART

Since 2005 the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart stands in the center of the city; a cubic structure of concrete which houses an important collection of German and international artists. It was there that the exhibition Gego. Line as object was installed. Gego lived in Stuttgart during her student years (1932-1938) and graduated as an engineer with a major in Architecture at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, nowadays part of the University of Stuttgart.

GEGO IN LEEDS. THREE-DIMENSIONAL AND TRANSPARENT

The Henry Moore Institute, in the English city of Leeds, is widely known as a center devoted 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 who was born in Leeds. Gego’s exhibition made its third and final stop at the HMI. Its director, Lisa Lefevbre, and one of the curators of the exhibition, pointed out Gego’s visionary approach to sculpture, a term the artist herself refused to use when referring to her work.

GEGO. The film

The premiere of the documentary film Gego, directed by Nathalie David, took place at Kino Abaton, an arthouse film venue in Hamburg. This fine documentary shows Gego’s oeuvre and the different scenarios of her life: Hamburg and Caracas, at the same time collecting the testimony of the curators of the different museums: Brigitte Kolle, Petra Roettig, Eva Marina Froitzheim and Lisa Lefevbre. In Caracas, the director also interviewed the family, friends, former students and Venezuelan critics who were close to Gego.

Gego. La poétique de la ligne. Colección Mercantil.

The exhibition Gego. La poétique de la ligne, which opened in Paris at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine under the curatorship of Tahía Rivero, showed a group of works which represent the different stages of the artist, made between 1963 and 1990, belonging to Colección Mercantil and to Fundación Gego.

Radical Geometry. Modern art of South America

The London public was able to enjoy an exhibition of Latin American art with works from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection. A sculpture by Gego from the sample was the image of the exhibition and could be admired on all the posters in the different stations of the London Underground.

Gerd Leufert. Listonados

Enmarcando a Gerd Leufert, Listonados was the exhibition shown by Sala Trasnocho Arte Contacto with the support of Fundación Gego and curated by Ruth Auerbach. A group of the artist’s friends, Álvaro Sotillo, Javier Aizpúrua, Lourdes Blanco, relatives , as well as Gabriela Fontanillas, Rosa Fernández and José Luis Sánchez paid a much-deserved homage to the artist on his one-hundredth birthday.

Mundo Nenia. Gerd Leufert 1914-2014

This was a research project and exhibition organized by Oficina Nº 1 in Los Galpones and curated by Carmen Alicia Di Pasquale. It showed the installation of eight pieces which Álvaro Sotillo interpreted based on the figures of Nenias created by Leufert. It also showed a sample of photographs made by Ricardo Armas of the 1985 exhibition at Museo de Bellas Artes. The open archive of 162 Nenia figures collected during the research project, directed and designed by Gabriela Fontanillas, was also shown.

Gego. Autobiography of a line. Dominique Lévy Gallery. New York

This exhibition attempted to explore Gego’s oeuvre beyond its cataloguing within Latin American constructivism. A publication with texts by the curators and art critics Sandra Antelo- Suárez, Jesús Fuenmayor, Chus Martínez and Kaira Cabañas was published. It also included the unpublished poem “Gego” by the poet and visual artist Anne Tardos.

Autobiography of a line. Dominique Lévy Gallery. London

Organized with the support of Fundación Gego, this was the first individual exhibition of the artist in London. It included a selection of her oeuvre, among which there were three monumental sculptures made in the 70s, which embody the tangible sensation of geometry and spatial play which characterizes Gego’s work. There was also a selection of drawings in ink on paper and later works which confront the relationship between drawing and sculpture, such as Dibujos sin papel, watercolors and Tejeduras.

Conversaciones FG

Conversaciones FG is the title of a series of micro documentaries which are being transmitted through the social media as of the month of July. It is a corpus of 17 interviews with different people from the national and international world of art. Each of them offers thoughts about present-day art, based on Gego’s oeuvre, history, validity and transcendence. The series is directed by Luis Montenegro Lafont.