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Infinite Viewpoints: Gego at the Guggenheim Bilbao
The Guggenheim turns its attention to the German-Venezuelan designer and artist...
November 16, 2023
Measuring Infinity borrows its name from the Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, and a work penned in homage to Gego’s Reticulárea (1969-1982). These large-scale, abstract sculptural installations are the artist’s best-known work, exhibited simultaneously, or in parallel, between Venezuela, Germany, and the US.
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Born in 1912, Gertrud Goldschmidt trained as an architect and engineer in Hamburg and Stuttgart, Germany. On the advice of her teachers, she fled the oncoming Nazi persecution in 1930s, she migrated to Caracas, Venezuela, while her family moved to England. 28 years old, Gego didn’t know Spanish: ‘I had a visa, and that was important!’
Kinetics became central to Gego’s practice in sculpture. But the wider context of that first movement, the intercontinental connections between Europe and South America, is not a focus of this new exhibition of her work in the Basque Country. Rather, Gego is posited as a unique individual in ‘Latin America’ (save for the references to her formative relationship with Gerd Leufert, a Lithuanian artist).
A touring exhibition, this final iteration of Measuring Infinity at the Guggenheim Bilbao is smaller than the first at the institution in New York. Co-curator Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, of the former, speaks of her Peruvian-American heritage, and how this shared history of migration has helped her connect with the artist. These subtleties are reflected in the curation, with a wealth of archive materials, and little nods to Gego’s personality; many more can be found in the institution’s online archive of videos and interviews, which also engage with the politics of estates.
Though condensed, attention is paid to the history of post-war Venezuela, and its ‘vanguardist’, experimental artistic community. As one of the world’s leading oil exporters, and with economic assistance from the US, the government was able to finance its own modernisation in both construction and culture. Parallel lines, a key feature in Gego’s practice, can also be found between politicised art movements, such as Geometric Abstraction and Cinetismo (Kinetic Art).
The military coup in 1948, and the resulting decade of the authoritarian dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, is here nuanced, a ‘paradoxical’ period of both political repression and cultural expansion. Archive photographs and drawings of ambitious government infrastructure projects, such as the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1951), are presented with great respect, an unfortunate rarity for works on paper. This building in particular is presented as an ‘unprecedented experiment’ in cross-cultural collaboration, bringing together Venezuelan, North American, and European artists.
Such projects – of a similar scale to those of Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil, and the collaborative exhibitions of the Casablanca Art School in Morocco – influenced Gego’s public practice in Caracas. With their monumental scale and structural complexity, her public artworks and architecture commissions hold a critical, yet often overlooked, position in her artistic development. Yet the works on paper presented here are crucial, the key to understanding her integrated, interdisciplinary practice. Indeed, though the line is central to Gego’s artworks, historians like Mónica Amor consider it as a route to movement, a line which connects and constellates.
Gego was an active participant in the Venezuelan arts community. Her children - now guardians of her estate, and active in the curation - talk about growing up in a house filled with artists and friends. It is reflected in her work in education and pedagogical approach (though, in captions which afford her individual personality and complexity, we understand she saw these practices as distinct). As a Professor of Fine Arts at the IDD (INCE) in Caracas, she often published with her students, resisting the binaries of age in her intergenerational collaboration. Again, this is subtly reflected in the exhibition’s research room and catalogue, designed by a former student.
Like the Reticulárea, designed to be exhibited together, Gego must be situated amongst her contemporaries, including Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Whilst she, a new mother, designed and constructed her first family home in Venezuela, her last home and studio with her partner, Penthouse B, was produced by the Venezuelan architect Jimmy Alcock. Conspicuously absent is Ruth Asawa, whose residencies at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles overlapped; Gutiérrez-Guimarães hints at her ongoing struggle to establish whether the two ever met in America.
The exclusive focus on the artist is deserved for this space, but viewing some of her contemporaries may help to put her early practice into context. Gego is best known for her stark monochrome, but the exhibition begins with her colourful, figurative works from her relocation to Tarmas, a rural village near the Caribbean coast. These hazy landscapes are akin to Peter Doig paintings; curated in conversation with her scenes of Europe, this section quietly speaks to the artist’s twin European and South American identities.
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Implicit in their industrial, metalwork sculptures is the artist’s admiration for the ‘radical structure’ of nature. This respect for natural, under-recognised, geometric patterns is evident in her experimentation with different materials and titles. Some of her other works refer to tumbleweeds, similarly marginalised, perhaps her way of resisting the hierarchy of forms.
We get only glimpses of her wider work in furnishings, lamps, and textiles, many of which no longer survive; a gap in the archive which, alongside her gender and location, could contribute to the artist’s relative underrepresentation in Western Europe. The focus, however, remains on her best-known sculptures, works which we as viewers participate in and complete through our own movement among them.
The Reticulárea are also the works here contextualised, on the same scale and ‘stature’ as Penetrables of the artist’s South American contemporaries in Brazil, like Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel (a Swiss-German), and Hélio Oiticica. Whilst others went to Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, to study, Gego did the reverse. And whilst this exhibition moves too, with simultaneous displays in Mexico City and São Paolo, it could not tour to Venezuela due to the current political climate, despite Gego’s popular status - the country’s Picasso, says Gutiérrez-Guimarães, recalling the artist currently on view in their other galleries in Bilbao. Measuring Infinity thus speaks as much to contemporary as historic realities, and how truths can often be spoken through migration and in diasporas.
Still, her position in and relationship to South America could be further explored - particularly, as Mary Schneider Enriquez suggests, how South American women artists had a higher profile than their US contemporaries, challenging Western/European definition (and superiority) of what makes ‘progressive’ politics and cultures.
Gego joins Clark, Eva Hesse, and soon, Tarsila do Amaral, as an older woman artist often overlooked but now afforded time and space at the Guggenheim galleries. This interdisciplinary curation is crucial for more intersectional understandings of the individual and wider history; Amor highlights how art historians tend to ‘bypass’ these artists’ feminist history, and read their practices exclusively in terms of ‘Third World’ modernism.
Gego is an artist who refused categorisation by movement, whose work focused as much on the ‘in-between’ empty spaces as the clear line. Her century-spanning practice was holistic, both big and intimate; a powerful point at a time when women are still often expected or curated as working only in the latter. Her practice helps pluralise – and perhaps even make infinite – our viewpoints.
Gego: Measuring Infinity was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is now on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao until 4th February 2024.
Measuring Infinity borrows its name from the Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, and a work penned in homage to Gego’s Reticulárea (1969-1982). These large-scale, abstract sculptural installations are the artist’s best-known work, exhibited simultaneously, or in parallel, between Venezuela, Germany, and the US.
Born in 1912, Gertrud Goldschmidt trained as an architect and engineer in Hamburg and Stuttgart, Germany. On the advice of her teachers, she fled the oncoming Nazi persecution in 1930s, she migrated to Caracas, Venezuela, while her family moved to England. 28 years old, Gego didn’t know Spanish: ‘I had a visa, and that was important!’
Kinetics became central to Gego’s practice in sculpture. But the wider context of that first movement, the intercontinental connections between Europe and South America, is not a focus of this new exhibition of her work in the Basque Country. Rather, Gego is posited as a unique individual in ‘Latin America’ (save for the references to her formative relationship with Gerd Leufert, a Lithuanian artist).
A touring exhibition, this final iteration of Measuring Infinity at the Guggenheim Bilbao is smaller than the first at the institution in New York. Co-curator Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, of the former, speaks of her Peruvian-American heritage, and how this shared history of migration has helped her connect with the artist. These subtleties are reflected in the curation, with a wealth of archive materials, and little nods to Gego’s personality; many more can be found in the institution’s online archive of videos and interviews, which also engage with the politics of estates.
Though condensed, attention is paid to the history of post-war Venezuela, and its ‘vanguardist’, experimental artistic community. As one of the world’s leading oil exporters, and with economic assistance from the US, the government was able to finance its own modernisation in both construction and culture. Parallel lines, a key feature in Gego’s practice, can also be found between politicised art movements, such as Geometric Abstraction and Cinetismo (Kinetic Art).
The military coup in 1948, and the resulting decade of the authoritarian dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, is here nuanced, a ‘paradoxical’ period of both political repression and cultural expansion. Archive photographs and drawings of ambitious government infrastructure projects, such as the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1951), are presented with great respect, an unfortunate rarity for works on paper. This building in particular is presented as an ‘unprecedented experiment’ in cross-cultural collaboration, bringing together Venezuelan, North American, and European artists.
Such projects – of a similar scale to those of Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil, and the collaborative exhibitions of the Casablanca Art School in Morocco – influenced Gego’s public practice in Caracas. With their monumental scale and structural complexity, her public artworks and architecture commissions hold a critical, yet often overlooked, position in her artistic development. Yet the works on paper presented here are crucial, the key to understanding her integrated, interdisciplinary practice. Indeed, though the line is central to Gego’s artworks, historians like Mónica Amor consider it as a route to movement, a line which connects and constellates.
Gego was an active participant in the Venezuelan arts community. Her children - now guardians of her estate, and active in the curation - talk about growing up in a house filled with artists and friends. It is reflected in her work in education and pedagogical approach (though, in captions which afford her individual personality and complexity, we understand she saw these practices as distinct). As a Professor of Fine Arts at the IDD (INCE) in Caracas, she often published with her students, resisting the binaries of age in her intergenerational collaboration. Again, this is subtly reflected in the exhibition’s research room and catalogue, designed by a former student.
Like the Reticulárea, designed to be exhibited together, Gego must be situated amongst her contemporaries, including Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Whilst she, a new mother, designed and constructed her first family home in Venezuela, her last home and studio with her partner, Penthouse B, was produced by the Venezuelan architect Jimmy Alcock. Conspicuously absent is Ruth Asawa, whose residencies at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles overlapped; Gutiérrez-Guimarães hints at her ongoing struggle to establish whether the two ever met in America.
The exclusive focus on the artist is deserved for this space, but viewing some of her contemporaries may help to put her early practice into context. Gego is best known for her stark monochrome, but the exhibition begins with her colourful, figurative works from her relocation to Tarmas, a rural village near the Caribbean coast. These hazy landscapes are akin to Peter Doig paintings; curated in conversation with her scenes of Europe, this section quietly speaks to the artist’s twin European and South American identities.
Implicit in their industrial, metalwork sculptures is the artist’s admiration for the ‘radical structure’ of nature. This respect for natural, under-recognised, geometric patterns is evident in her experimentation with different materials and titles. Some of her other works refer to tumbleweeds, similarly marginalised, perhaps her way of resisting the hierarchy of forms.
We get only glimpses of her wider work in furnishings, lamps, and textiles, many of which no longer survive; a gap in the archive which, alongside her gender and location, could contribute to the artist’s relative underrepresentation in Western Europe. The focus, however, remains on her best-known sculptures, works which we as viewers participate in and complete through our own movement among them.
The Reticulárea are also the works here contextualised, on the same scale and ‘stature’ as Penetrables of the artist’s South American contemporaries in Brazil, like Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel (a Swiss-German), and Hélio Oiticica. Whilst others went to Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, to study, Gego did the reverse. And whilst this exhibition moves too, with simultaneous displays in Mexico City and São Paolo, it could not tour to Venezuela due to the current political climate, despite Gego’s popular status - the country’s Picasso, says Gutiérrez-Guimarães, recalling the artist currently on view in their other galleries in Bilbao. Measuring Infinity thus speaks as much to contemporary as historic realities, and how truths can often be spoken through migration and in diasporas.
Still, her position in and relationship to South America could be further explored - particularly, as Mary Schneider Enriquez suggests, how South American women artists had a higher profile than their US contemporaries, challenging Western/European definition (and superiority) of what makes ‘progressive’ politics and cultures.
Gego joins Clark, Eva Hesse, and soon, Tarsila do Amaral, as an older woman artist often overlooked but now afforded time and space at the Guggenheim galleries. This interdisciplinary curation is crucial for more intersectional understandings of the individual and wider history; Amor highlights how art historians tend to ‘bypass’ these artists’ feminist history, and read their practices exclusively in terms of ‘Third World’ modernism.
Gego is an artist who refused categorisation by movement, whose work focused as much on the ‘in-between’ empty spaces as the clear line. Her century-spanning practice was holistic, both big and intimate; a powerful point at a time when women are still often expected or curated as working only in the latter. Her practice helps pluralise – and perhaps even make infinite – our viewpoints.
Gego: Measuring Infinity was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is now on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao until 4th February 2024.
Measuring Infinity borrows its name from the Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, and a work penned in homage to Gego’s Reticulárea (1969-1982). These large-scale, abstract sculptural installations are the artist’s best-known work, exhibited simultaneously, or in parallel, between Venezuela, Germany, and the US.
Born in 1912, Gertrud Goldschmidt trained as an architect and engineer in Hamburg and Stuttgart, Germany. On the advice of her teachers, she fled the oncoming Nazi persecution in 1930s, she migrated to Caracas, Venezuela, while her family moved to England. 28 years old, Gego didn’t know Spanish: ‘I had a visa, and that was important!’
Kinetics became central to Gego’s practice in sculpture. But the wider context of that first movement, the intercontinental connections between Europe and South America, is not a focus of this new exhibition of her work in the Basque Country. Rather, Gego is posited as a unique individual in ‘Latin America’ (save for the references to her formative relationship with Gerd Leufert, a Lithuanian artist).
A touring exhibition, this final iteration of Measuring Infinity at the Guggenheim Bilbao is smaller than the first at the institution in New York. Co-curator Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, of the former, speaks of her Peruvian-American heritage, and how this shared history of migration has helped her connect with the artist. These subtleties are reflected in the curation, with a wealth of archive materials, and little nods to Gego’s personality; many more can be found in the institution’s online archive of videos and interviews, which also engage with the politics of estates.
Though condensed, attention is paid to the history of post-war Venezuela, and its ‘vanguardist’, experimental artistic community. As one of the world’s leading oil exporters, and with economic assistance from the US, the government was able to finance its own modernisation in both construction and culture. Parallel lines, a key feature in Gego’s practice, can also be found between politicised art movements, such as Geometric Abstraction and Cinetismo (Kinetic Art).
The military coup in 1948, and the resulting decade of the authoritarian dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, is here nuanced, a ‘paradoxical’ period of both political repression and cultural expansion. Archive photographs and drawings of ambitious government infrastructure projects, such as the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1951), are presented with great respect, an unfortunate rarity for works on paper. This building in particular is presented as an ‘unprecedented experiment’ in cross-cultural collaboration, bringing together Venezuelan, North American, and European artists.
Such projects – of a similar scale to those of Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil, and the collaborative exhibitions of the Casablanca Art School in Morocco – influenced Gego’s public practice in Caracas. With their monumental scale and structural complexity, her public artworks and architecture commissions hold a critical, yet often overlooked, position in her artistic development. Yet the works on paper presented here are crucial, the key to understanding her integrated, interdisciplinary practice. Indeed, though the line is central to Gego’s artworks, historians like Mónica Amor consider it as a route to movement, a line which connects and constellates.
Gego was an active participant in the Venezuelan arts community. Her children - now guardians of her estate, and active in the curation - talk about growing up in a house filled with artists and friends. It is reflected in her work in education and pedagogical approach (though, in captions which afford her individual personality and complexity, we understand she saw these practices as distinct). As a Professor of Fine Arts at the IDD (INCE) in Caracas, she often published with her students, resisting the binaries of age in her intergenerational collaboration. Again, this is subtly reflected in the exhibition’s research room and catalogue, designed by a former student.
Like the Reticulárea, designed to be exhibited together, Gego must be situated amongst her contemporaries, including Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Whilst she, a new mother, designed and constructed her first family home in Venezuela, her last home and studio with her partner, Penthouse B, was produced by the Venezuelan architect Jimmy Alcock. Conspicuously absent is Ruth Asawa, whose residencies at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles overlapped; Gutiérrez-Guimarães hints at her ongoing struggle to establish whether the two ever met in America.
The exclusive focus on the artist is deserved for this space, but viewing some of her contemporaries may help to put her early practice into context. Gego is best known for her stark monochrome, but the exhibition begins with her colourful, figurative works from her relocation to Tarmas, a rural village near the Caribbean coast. These hazy landscapes are akin to Peter Doig paintings; curated in conversation with her scenes of Europe, this section quietly speaks to the artist’s twin European and South American identities.
Implicit in their industrial, metalwork sculptures is the artist’s admiration for the ‘radical structure’ of nature. This respect for natural, under-recognised, geometric patterns is evident in her experimentation with different materials and titles. Some of her other works refer to tumbleweeds, similarly marginalised, perhaps her way of resisting the hierarchy of forms.
We get only glimpses of her wider work in furnishings, lamps, and textiles, many of which no longer survive; a gap in the archive which, alongside her gender and location, could contribute to the artist’s relative underrepresentation in Western Europe. The focus, however, remains on her best-known sculptures, works which we as viewers participate in and complete through our own movement among them.
The Reticulárea are also the works here contextualised, on the same scale and ‘stature’ as Penetrables of the artist’s South American contemporaries in Brazil, like Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel (a Swiss-German), and Hélio Oiticica. Whilst others went to Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, to study, Gego did the reverse. And whilst this exhibition moves too, with simultaneous displays in Mexico City and São Paolo, it could not tour to Venezuela due to the current political climate, despite Gego’s popular status - the country’s Picasso, says Gutiérrez-Guimarães, recalling the artist currently on view in their other galleries in Bilbao. Measuring Infinity thus speaks as much to contemporary as historic realities, and how truths can often be spoken through migration and in diasporas.
Still, her position in and relationship to South America could be further explored - particularly, as Mary Schneider Enriquez suggests, how South American women artists had a higher profile than their US contemporaries, challenging Western/European definition (and superiority) of what makes ‘progressive’ politics and cultures.
Gego joins Clark, Eva Hesse, and soon, Tarsila do Amaral, as an older woman artist often overlooked but now afforded time and space at the Guggenheim galleries. This interdisciplinary curation is crucial for more intersectional understandings of the individual and wider history; Amor highlights how art historians tend to ‘bypass’ these artists’ feminist history, and read their practices exclusively in terms of ‘Third World’ modernism.
Gego is an artist who refused categorisation by movement, whose work focused as much on the ‘in-between’ empty spaces as the clear line. Her century-spanning practice was holistic, both big and intimate; a powerful point at a time when women are still often expected or curated as working only in the latter. Her practice helps pluralise – and perhaps even make infinite – our viewpoints.
Gego: Measuring Infinity was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is now on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao until 4th February 2024.
Measuring Infinity borrows its name from the Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, and a work penned in homage to Gego’s Reticulárea (1969-1982). These large-scale, abstract sculptural installations are the artist’s best-known work, exhibited simultaneously, or in parallel, between Venezuela, Germany, and the US.
Born in 1912, Gertrud Goldschmidt trained as an architect and engineer in Hamburg and Stuttgart, Germany. On the advice of her teachers, she fled the oncoming Nazi persecution in 1930s, she migrated to Caracas, Venezuela, while her family moved to England. 28 years old, Gego didn’t know Spanish: ‘I had a visa, and that was important!’
Kinetics became central to Gego’s practice in sculpture. But the wider context of that first movement, the intercontinental connections between Europe and South America, is not a focus of this new exhibition of her work in the Basque Country. Rather, Gego is posited as a unique individual in ‘Latin America’ (save for the references to her formative relationship with Gerd Leufert, a Lithuanian artist).
A touring exhibition, this final iteration of Measuring Infinity at the Guggenheim Bilbao is smaller than the first at the institution in New York. Co-curator Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, of the former, speaks of her Peruvian-American heritage, and how this shared history of migration has helped her connect with the artist. These subtleties are reflected in the curation, with a wealth of archive materials, and little nods to Gego’s personality; many more can be found in the institution’s online archive of videos and interviews, which also engage with the politics of estates.
Though condensed, attention is paid to the history of post-war Venezuela, and its ‘vanguardist’, experimental artistic community. As one of the world’s leading oil exporters, and with economic assistance from the US, the government was able to finance its own modernisation in both construction and culture. Parallel lines, a key feature in Gego’s practice, can also be found between politicised art movements, such as Geometric Abstraction and Cinetismo (Kinetic Art).
The military coup in 1948, and the resulting decade of the authoritarian dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, is here nuanced, a ‘paradoxical’ period of both political repression and cultural expansion. Archive photographs and drawings of ambitious government infrastructure projects, such as the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1951), are presented with great respect, an unfortunate rarity for works on paper. This building in particular is presented as an ‘unprecedented experiment’ in cross-cultural collaboration, bringing together Venezuelan, North American, and European artists.
Such projects – of a similar scale to those of Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil, and the collaborative exhibitions of the Casablanca Art School in Morocco – influenced Gego’s public practice in Caracas. With their monumental scale and structural complexity, her public artworks and architecture commissions hold a critical, yet often overlooked, position in her artistic development. Yet the works on paper presented here are crucial, the key to understanding her integrated, interdisciplinary practice. Indeed, though the line is central to Gego’s artworks, historians like Mónica Amor consider it as a route to movement, a line which connects and constellates.
Gego was an active participant in the Venezuelan arts community. Her children - now guardians of her estate, and active in the curation - talk about growing up in a house filled with artists and friends. It is reflected in her work in education and pedagogical approach (though, in captions which afford her individual personality and complexity, we understand she saw these practices as distinct). As a Professor of Fine Arts at the IDD (INCE) in Caracas, she often published with her students, resisting the binaries of age in her intergenerational collaboration. Again, this is subtly reflected in the exhibition’s research room and catalogue, designed by a former student.
Like the Reticulárea, designed to be exhibited together, Gego must be situated amongst her contemporaries, including Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Whilst she, a new mother, designed and constructed her first family home in Venezuela, her last home and studio with her partner, Penthouse B, was produced by the Venezuelan architect Jimmy Alcock. Conspicuously absent is Ruth Asawa, whose residencies at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles overlapped; Gutiérrez-Guimarães hints at her ongoing struggle to establish whether the two ever met in America.
The exclusive focus on the artist is deserved for this space, but viewing some of her contemporaries may help to put her early practice into context. Gego is best known for her stark monochrome, but the exhibition begins with her colourful, figurative works from her relocation to Tarmas, a rural village near the Caribbean coast. These hazy landscapes are akin to Peter Doig paintings; curated in conversation with her scenes of Europe, this section quietly speaks to the artist’s twin European and South American identities.
Implicit in their industrial, metalwork sculptures is the artist’s admiration for the ‘radical structure’ of nature. This respect for natural, under-recognised, geometric patterns is evident in her experimentation with different materials and titles. Some of her other works refer to tumbleweeds, similarly marginalised, perhaps her way of resisting the hierarchy of forms.
We get only glimpses of her wider work in furnishings, lamps, and textiles, many of which no longer survive; a gap in the archive which, alongside her gender and location, could contribute to the artist’s relative underrepresentation in Western Europe. The focus, however, remains on her best-known sculptures, works which we as viewers participate in and complete through our own movement among them.
The Reticulárea are also the works here contextualised, on the same scale and ‘stature’ as Penetrables of the artist’s South American contemporaries in Brazil, like Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel (a Swiss-German), and Hélio Oiticica. Whilst others went to Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, to study, Gego did the reverse. And whilst this exhibition moves too, with simultaneous displays in Mexico City and São Paolo, it could not tour to Venezuela due to the current political climate, despite Gego’s popular status - the country’s Picasso, says Gutiérrez-Guimarães, recalling the artist currently on view in their other galleries in Bilbao. Measuring Infinity thus speaks as much to contemporary as historic realities, and how truths can often be spoken through migration and in diasporas.
Still, her position in and relationship to South America could be further explored - particularly, as Mary Schneider Enriquez suggests, how South American women artists had a higher profile than their US contemporaries, challenging Western/European definition (and superiority) of what makes ‘progressive’ politics and cultures.
Gego joins Clark, Eva Hesse, and soon, Tarsila do Amaral, as an older woman artist often overlooked but now afforded time and space at the Guggenheim galleries. This interdisciplinary curation is crucial for more intersectional understandings of the individual and wider history; Amor highlights how art historians tend to ‘bypass’ these artists’ feminist history, and read their practices exclusively in terms of ‘Third World’ modernism.
Gego is an artist who refused categorisation by movement, whose work focused as much on the ‘in-between’ empty spaces as the clear line. Her century-spanning practice was holistic, both big and intimate; a powerful point at a time when women are still often expected or curated as working only in the latter. Her practice helps pluralise – and perhaps even make infinite – our viewpoints.
Gego: Measuring Infinity was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is now on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao until 4th February 2024.
Measuring Infinity borrows its name from the Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, and a work penned in homage to Gego’s Reticulárea (1969-1982). These large-scale, abstract sculptural installations are the artist’s best-known work, exhibited simultaneously, or in parallel, between Venezuela, Germany, and the US.
Born in 1912, Gertrud Goldschmidt trained as an architect and engineer in Hamburg and Stuttgart, Germany. On the advice of her teachers, she fled the oncoming Nazi persecution in 1930s, she migrated to Caracas, Venezuela, while her family moved to England. 28 years old, Gego didn’t know Spanish: ‘I had a visa, and that was important!’
Kinetics became central to Gego’s practice in sculpture. But the wider context of that first movement, the intercontinental connections between Europe and South America, is not a focus of this new exhibition of her work in the Basque Country. Rather, Gego is posited as a unique individual in ‘Latin America’ (save for the references to her formative relationship with Gerd Leufert, a Lithuanian artist).
A touring exhibition, this final iteration of Measuring Infinity at the Guggenheim Bilbao is smaller than the first at the institution in New York. Co-curator Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, of the former, speaks of her Peruvian-American heritage, and how this shared history of migration has helped her connect with the artist. These subtleties are reflected in the curation, with a wealth of archive materials, and little nods to Gego’s personality; many more can be found in the institution’s online archive of videos and interviews, which also engage with the politics of estates.
Though condensed, attention is paid to the history of post-war Venezuela, and its ‘vanguardist’, experimental artistic community. As one of the world’s leading oil exporters, and with economic assistance from the US, the government was able to finance its own modernisation in both construction and culture. Parallel lines, a key feature in Gego’s practice, can also be found between politicised art movements, such as Geometric Abstraction and Cinetismo (Kinetic Art).
The military coup in 1948, and the resulting decade of the authoritarian dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, is here nuanced, a ‘paradoxical’ period of both political repression and cultural expansion. Archive photographs and drawings of ambitious government infrastructure projects, such as the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1951), are presented with great respect, an unfortunate rarity for works on paper. This building in particular is presented as an ‘unprecedented experiment’ in cross-cultural collaboration, bringing together Venezuelan, North American, and European artists.
Such projects – of a similar scale to those of Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil, and the collaborative exhibitions of the Casablanca Art School in Morocco – influenced Gego’s public practice in Caracas. With their monumental scale and structural complexity, her public artworks and architecture commissions hold a critical, yet often overlooked, position in her artistic development. Yet the works on paper presented here are crucial, the key to understanding her integrated, interdisciplinary practice. Indeed, though the line is central to Gego’s artworks, historians like Mónica Amor consider it as a route to movement, a line which connects and constellates.
Gego was an active participant in the Venezuelan arts community. Her children - now guardians of her estate, and active in the curation - talk about growing up in a house filled with artists and friends. It is reflected in her work in education and pedagogical approach (though, in captions which afford her individual personality and complexity, we understand she saw these practices as distinct). As a Professor of Fine Arts at the IDD (INCE) in Caracas, she often published with her students, resisting the binaries of age in her intergenerational collaboration. Again, this is subtly reflected in the exhibition’s research room and catalogue, designed by a former student.
Like the Reticulárea, designed to be exhibited together, Gego must be situated amongst her contemporaries, including Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Whilst she, a new mother, designed and constructed her first family home in Venezuela, her last home and studio with her partner, Penthouse B, was produced by the Venezuelan architect Jimmy Alcock. Conspicuously absent is Ruth Asawa, whose residencies at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles overlapped; Gutiérrez-Guimarães hints at her ongoing struggle to establish whether the two ever met in America.
The exclusive focus on the artist is deserved for this space, but viewing some of her contemporaries may help to put her early practice into context. Gego is best known for her stark monochrome, but the exhibition begins with her colourful, figurative works from her relocation to Tarmas, a rural village near the Caribbean coast. These hazy landscapes are akin to Peter Doig paintings; curated in conversation with her scenes of Europe, this section quietly speaks to the artist’s twin European and South American identities.
Implicit in their industrial, metalwork sculptures is the artist’s admiration for the ‘radical structure’ of nature. This respect for natural, under-recognised, geometric patterns is evident in her experimentation with different materials and titles. Some of her other works refer to tumbleweeds, similarly marginalised, perhaps her way of resisting the hierarchy of forms.
We get only glimpses of her wider work in furnishings, lamps, and textiles, many of which no longer survive; a gap in the archive which, alongside her gender and location, could contribute to the artist’s relative underrepresentation in Western Europe. The focus, however, remains on her best-known sculptures, works which we as viewers participate in and complete through our own movement among them.
The Reticulárea are also the works here contextualised, on the same scale and ‘stature’ as Penetrables of the artist’s South American contemporaries in Brazil, like Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel (a Swiss-German), and Hélio Oiticica. Whilst others went to Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, to study, Gego did the reverse. And whilst this exhibition moves too, with simultaneous displays in Mexico City and São Paolo, it could not tour to Venezuela due to the current political climate, despite Gego’s popular status - the country’s Picasso, says Gutiérrez-Guimarães, recalling the artist currently on view in their other galleries in Bilbao. Measuring Infinity thus speaks as much to contemporary as historic realities, and how truths can often be spoken through migration and in diasporas.
Still, her position in and relationship to South America could be further explored - particularly, as Mary Schneider Enriquez suggests, how South American women artists had a higher profile than their US contemporaries, challenging Western/European definition (and superiority) of what makes ‘progressive’ politics and cultures.
Gego joins Clark, Eva Hesse, and soon, Tarsila do Amaral, as an older woman artist often overlooked but now afforded time and space at the Guggenheim galleries. This interdisciplinary curation is crucial for more intersectional understandings of the individual and wider history; Amor highlights how art historians tend to ‘bypass’ these artists’ feminist history, and read their practices exclusively in terms of ‘Third World’ modernism.
Gego is an artist who refused categorisation by movement, whose work focused as much on the ‘in-between’ empty spaces as the clear line. Her century-spanning practice was holistic, both big and intimate; a powerful point at a time when women are still often expected or curated as working only in the latter. Her practice helps pluralise – and perhaps even make infinite – our viewpoints.
Gego: Measuring Infinity was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is now on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao until 4th February 2024.
Measuring Infinity borrows its name from the Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, and a work penned in homage to Gego’s Reticulárea (1969-1982). These large-scale, abstract sculptural installations are the artist’s best-known work, exhibited simultaneously, or in parallel, between Venezuela, Germany, and the US.
Born in 1912, Gertrud Goldschmidt trained as an architect and engineer in Hamburg and Stuttgart, Germany. On the advice of her teachers, she fled the oncoming Nazi persecution in 1930s, she migrated to Caracas, Venezuela, while her family moved to England. 28 years old, Gego didn’t know Spanish: ‘I had a visa, and that was important!’
Kinetics became central to Gego’s practice in sculpture. But the wider context of that first movement, the intercontinental connections between Europe and South America, is not a focus of this new exhibition of her work in the Basque Country. Rather, Gego is posited as a unique individual in ‘Latin America’ (save for the references to her formative relationship with Gerd Leufert, a Lithuanian artist).
A touring exhibition, this final iteration of Measuring Infinity at the Guggenheim Bilbao is smaller than the first at the institution in New York. Co-curator Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, of the former, speaks of her Peruvian-American heritage, and how this shared history of migration has helped her connect with the artist. These subtleties are reflected in the curation, with a wealth of archive materials, and little nods to Gego’s personality; many more can be found in the institution’s online archive of videos and interviews, which also engage with the politics of estates.
Though condensed, attention is paid to the history of post-war Venezuela, and its ‘vanguardist’, experimental artistic community. As one of the world’s leading oil exporters, and with economic assistance from the US, the government was able to finance its own modernisation in both construction and culture. Parallel lines, a key feature in Gego’s practice, can also be found between politicised art movements, such as Geometric Abstraction and Cinetismo (Kinetic Art).
The military coup in 1948, and the resulting decade of the authoritarian dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, is here nuanced, a ‘paradoxical’ period of both political repression and cultural expansion. Archive photographs and drawings of ambitious government infrastructure projects, such as the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1951), are presented with great respect, an unfortunate rarity for works on paper. This building in particular is presented as an ‘unprecedented experiment’ in cross-cultural collaboration, bringing together Venezuelan, North American, and European artists.
Such projects – of a similar scale to those of Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil, and the collaborative exhibitions of the Casablanca Art School in Morocco – influenced Gego’s public practice in Caracas. With their monumental scale and structural complexity, her public artworks and architecture commissions hold a critical, yet often overlooked, position in her artistic development. Yet the works on paper presented here are crucial, the key to understanding her integrated, interdisciplinary practice. Indeed, though the line is central to Gego’s artworks, historians like Mónica Amor consider it as a route to movement, a line which connects and constellates.
Gego was an active participant in the Venezuelan arts community. Her children - now guardians of her estate, and active in the curation - talk about growing up in a house filled with artists and friends. It is reflected in her work in education and pedagogical approach (though, in captions which afford her individual personality and complexity, we understand she saw these practices as distinct). As a Professor of Fine Arts at the IDD (INCE) in Caracas, she often published with her students, resisting the binaries of age in her intergenerational collaboration. Again, this is subtly reflected in the exhibition’s research room and catalogue, designed by a former student.
Like the Reticulárea, designed to be exhibited together, Gego must be situated amongst her contemporaries, including Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Whilst she, a new mother, designed and constructed her first family home in Venezuela, her last home and studio with her partner, Penthouse B, was produced by the Venezuelan architect Jimmy Alcock. Conspicuously absent is Ruth Asawa, whose residencies at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles overlapped; Gutiérrez-Guimarães hints at her ongoing struggle to establish whether the two ever met in America.
The exclusive focus on the artist is deserved for this space, but viewing some of her contemporaries may help to put her early practice into context. Gego is best known for her stark monochrome, but the exhibition begins with her colourful, figurative works from her relocation to Tarmas, a rural village near the Caribbean coast. These hazy landscapes are akin to Peter Doig paintings; curated in conversation with her scenes of Europe, this section quietly speaks to the artist’s twin European and South American identities.
Implicit in their industrial, metalwork sculptures is the artist’s admiration for the ‘radical structure’ of nature. This respect for natural, under-recognised, geometric patterns is evident in her experimentation with different materials and titles. Some of her other works refer to tumbleweeds, similarly marginalised, perhaps her way of resisting the hierarchy of forms.
We get only glimpses of her wider work in furnishings, lamps, and textiles, many of which no longer survive; a gap in the archive which, alongside her gender and location, could contribute to the artist’s relative underrepresentation in Western Europe. The focus, however, remains on her best-known sculptures, works which we as viewers participate in and complete through our own movement among them.
The Reticulárea are also the works here contextualised, on the same scale and ‘stature’ as Penetrables of the artist’s South American contemporaries in Brazil, like Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel (a Swiss-German), and Hélio Oiticica. Whilst others went to Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, to study, Gego did the reverse. And whilst this exhibition moves too, with simultaneous displays in Mexico City and São Paolo, it could not tour to Venezuela due to the current political climate, despite Gego’s popular status - the country’s Picasso, says Gutiérrez-Guimarães, recalling the artist currently on view in their other galleries in Bilbao. Measuring Infinity thus speaks as much to contemporary as historic realities, and how truths can often be spoken through migration and in diasporas.
Still, her position in and relationship to South America could be further explored - particularly, as Mary Schneider Enriquez suggests, how South American women artists had a higher profile than their US contemporaries, challenging Western/European definition (and superiority) of what makes ‘progressive’ politics and cultures.
Gego joins Clark, Eva Hesse, and soon, Tarsila do Amaral, as an older woman artist often overlooked but now afforded time and space at the Guggenheim galleries. This interdisciplinary curation is crucial for more intersectional understandings of the individual and wider history; Amor highlights how art historians tend to ‘bypass’ these artists’ feminist history, and read their practices exclusively in terms of ‘Third World’ modernism.
Gego is an artist who refused categorisation by movement, whose work focused as much on the ‘in-between’ empty spaces as the clear line. Her century-spanning practice was holistic, both big and intimate; a powerful point at a time when women are still often expected or curated as working only in the latter. Her practice helps pluralise – and perhaps even make infinite – our viewpoints.
Gego: Measuring Infinity was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is now on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao until 4th February 2024.
Measuring Infinity borrows its name from the Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, and a work penned in homage to Gego’s Reticulárea (1969-1982). These large-scale, abstract sculptural installations are the artist’s best-known work, exhibited simultaneously, or in parallel, between Venezuela, Germany, and the US.
Born in 1912, Gertrud Goldschmidt trained as an architect and engineer in Hamburg and Stuttgart, Germany. On the advice of her teachers, she fled the oncoming Nazi persecution in 1930s, she migrated to Caracas, Venezuela, while her family moved to England. 28 years old, Gego didn’t know Spanish: ‘I had a visa, and that was important!’
Kinetics became central to Gego’s practice in sculpture. But the wider context of that first movement, the intercontinental connections between Europe and South America, is not a focus of this new exhibition of her work in the Basque Country. Rather, Gego is posited as a unique individual in ‘Latin America’ (save for the references to her formative relationship with Gerd Leufert, a Lithuanian artist).
A touring exhibition, this final iteration of Measuring Infinity at the Guggenheim Bilbao is smaller than the first at the institution in New York. Co-curator Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, of the former, speaks of her Peruvian-American heritage, and how this shared history of migration has helped her connect with the artist. These subtleties are reflected in the curation, with a wealth of archive materials, and little nods to Gego’s personality; many more can be found in the institution’s online archive of videos and interviews, which also engage with the politics of estates.
Though condensed, attention is paid to the history of post-war Venezuela, and its ‘vanguardist’, experimental artistic community. As one of the world’s leading oil exporters, and with economic assistance from the US, the government was able to finance its own modernisation in both construction and culture. Parallel lines, a key feature in Gego’s practice, can also be found between politicised art movements, such as Geometric Abstraction and Cinetismo (Kinetic Art).
The military coup in 1948, and the resulting decade of the authoritarian dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, is here nuanced, a ‘paradoxical’ period of both political repression and cultural expansion. Archive photographs and drawings of ambitious government infrastructure projects, such as the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1951), are presented with great respect, an unfortunate rarity for works on paper. This building in particular is presented as an ‘unprecedented experiment’ in cross-cultural collaboration, bringing together Venezuelan, North American, and European artists.
Such projects – of a similar scale to those of Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil, and the collaborative exhibitions of the Casablanca Art School in Morocco – influenced Gego’s public practice in Caracas. With their monumental scale and structural complexity, her public artworks and architecture commissions hold a critical, yet often overlooked, position in her artistic development. Yet the works on paper presented here are crucial, the key to understanding her integrated, interdisciplinary practice. Indeed, though the line is central to Gego’s artworks, historians like Mónica Amor consider it as a route to movement, a line which connects and constellates.
Gego was an active participant in the Venezuelan arts community. Her children - now guardians of her estate, and active in the curation - talk about growing up in a house filled with artists and friends. It is reflected in her work in education and pedagogical approach (though, in captions which afford her individual personality and complexity, we understand she saw these practices as distinct). As a Professor of Fine Arts at the IDD (INCE) in Caracas, she often published with her students, resisting the binaries of age in her intergenerational collaboration. Again, this is subtly reflected in the exhibition’s research room and catalogue, designed by a former student.
Like the Reticulárea, designed to be exhibited together, Gego must be situated amongst her contemporaries, including Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Whilst she, a new mother, designed and constructed her first family home in Venezuela, her last home and studio with her partner, Penthouse B, was produced by the Venezuelan architect Jimmy Alcock. Conspicuously absent is Ruth Asawa, whose residencies at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles overlapped; Gutiérrez-Guimarães hints at her ongoing struggle to establish whether the two ever met in America.
The exclusive focus on the artist is deserved for this space, but viewing some of her contemporaries may help to put her early practice into context. Gego is best known for her stark monochrome, but the exhibition begins with her colourful, figurative works from her relocation to Tarmas, a rural village near the Caribbean coast. These hazy landscapes are akin to Peter Doig paintings; curated in conversation with her scenes of Europe, this section quietly speaks to the artist’s twin European and South American identities.
Implicit in their industrial, metalwork sculptures is the artist’s admiration for the ‘radical structure’ of nature. This respect for natural, under-recognised, geometric patterns is evident in her experimentation with different materials and titles. Some of her other works refer to tumbleweeds, similarly marginalised, perhaps her way of resisting the hierarchy of forms.
We get only glimpses of her wider work in furnishings, lamps, and textiles, many of which no longer survive; a gap in the archive which, alongside her gender and location, could contribute to the artist’s relative underrepresentation in Western Europe. The focus, however, remains on her best-known sculptures, works which we as viewers participate in and complete through our own movement among them.
The Reticulárea are also the works here contextualised, on the same scale and ‘stature’ as Penetrables of the artist’s South American contemporaries in Brazil, like Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel (a Swiss-German), and Hélio Oiticica. Whilst others went to Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, to study, Gego did the reverse. And whilst this exhibition moves too, with simultaneous displays in Mexico City and São Paolo, it could not tour to Venezuela due to the current political climate, despite Gego’s popular status - the country’s Picasso, says Gutiérrez-Guimarães, recalling the artist currently on view in their other galleries in Bilbao. Measuring Infinity thus speaks as much to contemporary as historic realities, and how truths can often be spoken through migration and in diasporas.
Still, her position in and relationship to South America could be further explored - particularly, as Mary Schneider Enriquez suggests, how South American women artists had a higher profile than their US contemporaries, challenging Western/European definition (and superiority) of what makes ‘progressive’ politics and cultures.
Gego joins Clark, Eva Hesse, and soon, Tarsila do Amaral, as an older woman artist often overlooked but now afforded time and space at the Guggenheim galleries. This interdisciplinary curation is crucial for more intersectional understandings of the individual and wider history; Amor highlights how art historians tend to ‘bypass’ these artists’ feminist history, and read their practices exclusively in terms of ‘Third World’ modernism.
Gego is an artist who refused categorisation by movement, whose work focused as much on the ‘in-between’ empty spaces as the clear line. Her century-spanning practice was holistic, both big and intimate; a powerful point at a time when women are still often expected or curated as working only in the latter. Her practice helps pluralise – and perhaps even make infinite – our viewpoints.
Gego: Measuring Infinity was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is now on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao until 4th February 2024.
Measuring Infinity borrows its name from the Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, and a work penned in homage to Gego’s Reticulárea (1969-1982). These large-scale, abstract sculptural installations are the artist’s best-known work, exhibited simultaneously, or in parallel, between Venezuela, Germany, and the US.
Born in 1912, Gertrud Goldschmidt trained as an architect and engineer in Hamburg and Stuttgart, Germany. On the advice of her teachers, she fled the oncoming Nazi persecution in 1930s, she migrated to Caracas, Venezuela, while her family moved to England. 28 years old, Gego didn’t know Spanish: ‘I had a visa, and that was important!’
Kinetics became central to Gego’s practice in sculpture. But the wider context of that first movement, the intercontinental connections between Europe and South America, is not a focus of this new exhibition of her work in the Basque Country. Rather, Gego is posited as a unique individual in ‘Latin America’ (save for the references to her formative relationship with Gerd Leufert, a Lithuanian artist).
A touring exhibition, this final iteration of Measuring Infinity at the Guggenheim Bilbao is smaller than the first at the institution in New York. Co-curator Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, of the former, speaks of her Peruvian-American heritage, and how this shared history of migration has helped her connect with the artist. These subtleties are reflected in the curation, with a wealth of archive materials, and little nods to Gego’s personality; many more can be found in the institution’s online archive of videos and interviews, which also engage with the politics of estates.
Though condensed, attention is paid to the history of post-war Venezuela, and its ‘vanguardist’, experimental artistic community. As one of the world’s leading oil exporters, and with economic assistance from the US, the government was able to finance its own modernisation in both construction and culture. Parallel lines, a key feature in Gego’s practice, can also be found between politicised art movements, such as Geometric Abstraction and Cinetismo (Kinetic Art).
The military coup in 1948, and the resulting decade of the authoritarian dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, is here nuanced, a ‘paradoxical’ period of both political repression and cultural expansion. Archive photographs and drawings of ambitious government infrastructure projects, such as the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1951), are presented with great respect, an unfortunate rarity for works on paper. This building in particular is presented as an ‘unprecedented experiment’ in cross-cultural collaboration, bringing together Venezuelan, North American, and European artists.
Such projects – of a similar scale to those of Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil, and the collaborative exhibitions of the Casablanca Art School in Morocco – influenced Gego’s public practice in Caracas. With their monumental scale and structural complexity, her public artworks and architecture commissions hold a critical, yet often overlooked, position in her artistic development. Yet the works on paper presented here are crucial, the key to understanding her integrated, interdisciplinary practice. Indeed, though the line is central to Gego’s artworks, historians like Mónica Amor consider it as a route to movement, a line which connects and constellates.
Gego was an active participant in the Venezuelan arts community. Her children - now guardians of her estate, and active in the curation - talk about growing up in a house filled with artists and friends. It is reflected in her work in education and pedagogical approach (though, in captions which afford her individual personality and complexity, we understand she saw these practices as distinct). As a Professor of Fine Arts at the IDD (INCE) in Caracas, she often published with her students, resisting the binaries of age in her intergenerational collaboration. Again, this is subtly reflected in the exhibition’s research room and catalogue, designed by a former student.
Like the Reticulárea, designed to be exhibited together, Gego must be situated amongst her contemporaries, including Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Whilst she, a new mother, designed and constructed her first family home in Venezuela, her last home and studio with her partner, Penthouse B, was produced by the Venezuelan architect Jimmy Alcock. Conspicuously absent is Ruth Asawa, whose residencies at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles overlapped; Gutiérrez-Guimarães hints at her ongoing struggle to establish whether the two ever met in America.
The exclusive focus on the artist is deserved for this space, but viewing some of her contemporaries may help to put her early practice into context. Gego is best known for her stark monochrome, but the exhibition begins with her colourful, figurative works from her relocation to Tarmas, a rural village near the Caribbean coast. These hazy landscapes are akin to Peter Doig paintings; curated in conversation with her scenes of Europe, this section quietly speaks to the artist’s twin European and South American identities.
Implicit in their industrial, metalwork sculptures is the artist’s admiration for the ‘radical structure’ of nature. This respect for natural, under-recognised, geometric patterns is evident in her experimentation with different materials and titles. Some of her other works refer to tumbleweeds, similarly marginalised, perhaps her way of resisting the hierarchy of forms.
We get only glimpses of her wider work in furnishings, lamps, and textiles, many of which no longer survive; a gap in the archive which, alongside her gender and location, could contribute to the artist’s relative underrepresentation in Western Europe. The focus, however, remains on her best-known sculptures, works which we as viewers participate in and complete through our own movement among them.
The Reticulárea are also the works here contextualised, on the same scale and ‘stature’ as Penetrables of the artist’s South American contemporaries in Brazil, like Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel (a Swiss-German), and Hélio Oiticica. Whilst others went to Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, to study, Gego did the reverse. And whilst this exhibition moves too, with simultaneous displays in Mexico City and São Paolo, it could not tour to Venezuela due to the current political climate, despite Gego’s popular status - the country’s Picasso, says Gutiérrez-Guimarães, recalling the artist currently on view in their other galleries in Bilbao. Measuring Infinity thus speaks as much to contemporary as historic realities, and how truths can often be spoken through migration and in diasporas.
Still, her position in and relationship to South America could be further explored - particularly, as Mary Schneider Enriquez suggests, how South American women artists had a higher profile than their US contemporaries, challenging Western/European definition (and superiority) of what makes ‘progressive’ politics and cultures.
Gego joins Clark, Eva Hesse, and soon, Tarsila do Amaral, as an older woman artist often overlooked but now afforded time and space at the Guggenheim galleries. This interdisciplinary curation is crucial for more intersectional understandings of the individual and wider history; Amor highlights how art historians tend to ‘bypass’ these artists’ feminist history, and read their practices exclusively in terms of ‘Third World’ modernism.
Gego is an artist who refused categorisation by movement, whose work focused as much on the ‘in-between’ empty spaces as the clear line. Her century-spanning practice was holistic, both big and intimate; a powerful point at a time when women are still often expected or curated as working only in the latter. Her practice helps pluralise – and perhaps even make infinite – our viewpoints.
Gego: Measuring Infinity was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is now on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao until 4th February 2024.
Measuring Infinity borrows its name from the Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, and a work penned in homage to Gego’s Reticulárea (1969-1982). These large-scale, abstract sculptural installations are the artist’s best-known work, exhibited simultaneously, or in parallel, between Venezuela, Germany, and the US.
Born in 1912, Gertrud Goldschmidt trained as an architect and engineer in Hamburg and Stuttgart, Germany. On the advice of her teachers, she fled the oncoming Nazi persecution in 1930s, she migrated to Caracas, Venezuela, while her family moved to England. 28 years old, Gego didn’t know Spanish: ‘I had a visa, and that was important!’
Kinetics became central to Gego’s practice in sculpture. But the wider context of that first movement, the intercontinental connections between Europe and South America, is not a focus of this new exhibition of her work in the Basque Country. Rather, Gego is posited as a unique individual in ‘Latin America’ (save for the references to her formative relationship with Gerd Leufert, a Lithuanian artist).
A touring exhibition, this final iteration of Measuring Infinity at the Guggenheim Bilbao is smaller than the first at the institution in New York. Co-curator Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, of the former, speaks of her Peruvian-American heritage, and how this shared history of migration has helped her connect with the artist. These subtleties are reflected in the curation, with a wealth of archive materials, and little nods to Gego’s personality; many more can be found in the institution’s online archive of videos and interviews, which also engage with the politics of estates.
Though condensed, attention is paid to the history of post-war Venezuela, and its ‘vanguardist’, experimental artistic community. As one of the world’s leading oil exporters, and with economic assistance from the US, the government was able to finance its own modernisation in both construction and culture. Parallel lines, a key feature in Gego’s practice, can also be found between politicised art movements, such as Geometric Abstraction and Cinetismo (Kinetic Art).
The military coup in 1948, and the resulting decade of the authoritarian dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, is here nuanced, a ‘paradoxical’ period of both political repression and cultural expansion. Archive photographs and drawings of ambitious government infrastructure projects, such as the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1951), are presented with great respect, an unfortunate rarity for works on paper. This building in particular is presented as an ‘unprecedented experiment’ in cross-cultural collaboration, bringing together Venezuelan, North American, and European artists.
Such projects – of a similar scale to those of Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil, and the collaborative exhibitions of the Casablanca Art School in Morocco – influenced Gego’s public practice in Caracas. With their monumental scale and structural complexity, her public artworks and architecture commissions hold a critical, yet often overlooked, position in her artistic development. Yet the works on paper presented here are crucial, the key to understanding her integrated, interdisciplinary practice. Indeed, though the line is central to Gego’s artworks, historians like Mónica Amor consider it as a route to movement, a line which connects and constellates.
Gego was an active participant in the Venezuelan arts community. Her children - now guardians of her estate, and active in the curation - talk about growing up in a house filled with artists and friends. It is reflected in her work in education and pedagogical approach (though, in captions which afford her individual personality and complexity, we understand she saw these practices as distinct). As a Professor of Fine Arts at the IDD (INCE) in Caracas, she often published with her students, resisting the binaries of age in her intergenerational collaboration. Again, this is subtly reflected in the exhibition’s research room and catalogue, designed by a former student.
Like the Reticulárea, designed to be exhibited together, Gego must be situated amongst her contemporaries, including Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Whilst she, a new mother, designed and constructed her first family home in Venezuela, her last home and studio with her partner, Penthouse B, was produced by the Venezuelan architect Jimmy Alcock. Conspicuously absent is Ruth Asawa, whose residencies at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles overlapped; Gutiérrez-Guimarães hints at her ongoing struggle to establish whether the two ever met in America.
The exclusive focus on the artist is deserved for this space, but viewing some of her contemporaries may help to put her early practice into context. Gego is best known for her stark monochrome, but the exhibition begins with her colourful, figurative works from her relocation to Tarmas, a rural village near the Caribbean coast. These hazy landscapes are akin to Peter Doig paintings; curated in conversation with her scenes of Europe, this section quietly speaks to the artist’s twin European and South American identities.
Implicit in their industrial, metalwork sculptures is the artist’s admiration for the ‘radical structure’ of nature. This respect for natural, under-recognised, geometric patterns is evident in her experimentation with different materials and titles. Some of her other works refer to tumbleweeds, similarly marginalised, perhaps her way of resisting the hierarchy of forms.
We get only glimpses of her wider work in furnishings, lamps, and textiles, many of which no longer survive; a gap in the archive which, alongside her gender and location, could contribute to the artist’s relative underrepresentation in Western Europe. The focus, however, remains on her best-known sculptures, works which we as viewers participate in and complete through our own movement among them.
The Reticulárea are also the works here contextualised, on the same scale and ‘stature’ as Penetrables of the artist’s South American contemporaries in Brazil, like Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel (a Swiss-German), and Hélio Oiticica. Whilst others went to Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, to study, Gego did the reverse. And whilst this exhibition moves too, with simultaneous displays in Mexico City and São Paolo, it could not tour to Venezuela due to the current political climate, despite Gego’s popular status - the country’s Picasso, says Gutiérrez-Guimarães, recalling the artist currently on view in their other galleries in Bilbao. Measuring Infinity thus speaks as much to contemporary as historic realities, and how truths can often be spoken through migration and in diasporas.
Still, her position in and relationship to South America could be further explored - particularly, as Mary Schneider Enriquez suggests, how South American women artists had a higher profile than their US contemporaries, challenging Western/European definition (and superiority) of what makes ‘progressive’ politics and cultures.
Gego joins Clark, Eva Hesse, and soon, Tarsila do Amaral, as an older woman artist often overlooked but now afforded time and space at the Guggenheim galleries. This interdisciplinary curation is crucial for more intersectional understandings of the individual and wider history; Amor highlights how art historians tend to ‘bypass’ these artists’ feminist history, and read their practices exclusively in terms of ‘Third World’ modernism.
Gego is an artist who refused categorisation by movement, whose work focused as much on the ‘in-between’ empty spaces as the clear line. Her century-spanning practice was holistic, both big and intimate; a powerful point at a time when women are still often expected or curated as working only in the latter. Her practice helps pluralise – and perhaps even make infinite – our viewpoints.
Gego: Measuring Infinity was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is now on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao until 4th February 2024.
Measuring Infinity borrows its name from the Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, and a work penned in homage to Gego’s Reticulárea (1969-1982). These large-scale, abstract sculptural installations are the artist’s best-known work, exhibited simultaneously, or in parallel, between Venezuela, Germany, and the US.
Born in 1912, Gertrud Goldschmidt trained as an architect and engineer in Hamburg and Stuttgart, Germany. On the advice of her teachers, she fled the oncoming Nazi persecution in 1930s, she migrated to Caracas, Venezuela, while her family moved to England. 28 years old, Gego didn’t know Spanish: ‘I had a visa, and that was important!’
Kinetics became central to Gego’s practice in sculpture. But the wider context of that first movement, the intercontinental connections between Europe and South America, is not a focus of this new exhibition of her work in the Basque Country. Rather, Gego is posited as a unique individual in ‘Latin America’ (save for the references to her formative relationship with Gerd Leufert, a Lithuanian artist).
A touring exhibition, this final iteration of Measuring Infinity at the Guggenheim Bilbao is smaller than the first at the institution in New York. Co-curator Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, of the former, speaks of her Peruvian-American heritage, and how this shared history of migration has helped her connect with the artist. These subtleties are reflected in the curation, with a wealth of archive materials, and little nods to Gego’s personality; many more can be found in the institution’s online archive of videos and interviews, which also engage with the politics of estates.
Though condensed, attention is paid to the history of post-war Venezuela, and its ‘vanguardist’, experimental artistic community. As one of the world’s leading oil exporters, and with economic assistance from the US, the government was able to finance its own modernisation in both construction and culture. Parallel lines, a key feature in Gego’s practice, can also be found between politicised art movements, such as Geometric Abstraction and Cinetismo (Kinetic Art).
The military coup in 1948, and the resulting decade of the authoritarian dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, is here nuanced, a ‘paradoxical’ period of both political repression and cultural expansion. Archive photographs and drawings of ambitious government infrastructure projects, such as the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1951), are presented with great respect, an unfortunate rarity for works on paper. This building in particular is presented as an ‘unprecedented experiment’ in cross-cultural collaboration, bringing together Venezuelan, North American, and European artists.
Such projects – of a similar scale to those of Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil, and the collaborative exhibitions of the Casablanca Art School in Morocco – influenced Gego’s public practice in Caracas. With their monumental scale and structural complexity, her public artworks and architecture commissions hold a critical, yet often overlooked, position in her artistic development. Yet the works on paper presented here are crucial, the key to understanding her integrated, interdisciplinary practice. Indeed, though the line is central to Gego’s artworks, historians like Mónica Amor consider it as a route to movement, a line which connects and constellates.
Gego was an active participant in the Venezuelan arts community. Her children - now guardians of her estate, and active in the curation - talk about growing up in a house filled with artists and friends. It is reflected in her work in education and pedagogical approach (though, in captions which afford her individual personality and complexity, we understand she saw these practices as distinct). As a Professor of Fine Arts at the IDD (INCE) in Caracas, she often published with her students, resisting the binaries of age in her intergenerational collaboration. Again, this is subtly reflected in the exhibition’s research room and catalogue, designed by a former student.
Like the Reticulárea, designed to be exhibited together, Gego must be situated amongst her contemporaries, including Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Whilst she, a new mother, designed and constructed her first family home in Venezuela, her last home and studio with her partner, Penthouse B, was produced by the Venezuelan architect Jimmy Alcock. Conspicuously absent is Ruth Asawa, whose residencies at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles overlapped; Gutiérrez-Guimarães hints at her ongoing struggle to establish whether the two ever met in America.
The exclusive focus on the artist is deserved for this space, but viewing some of her contemporaries may help to put her early practice into context. Gego is best known for her stark monochrome, but the exhibition begins with her colourful, figurative works from her relocation to Tarmas, a rural village near the Caribbean coast. These hazy landscapes are akin to Peter Doig paintings; curated in conversation with her scenes of Europe, this section quietly speaks to the artist’s twin European and South American identities.
Implicit in their industrial, metalwork sculptures is the artist’s admiration for the ‘radical structure’ of nature. This respect for natural, under-recognised, geometric patterns is evident in her experimentation with different materials and titles. Some of her other works refer to tumbleweeds, similarly marginalised, perhaps her way of resisting the hierarchy of forms.
We get only glimpses of her wider work in furnishings, lamps, and textiles, many of which no longer survive; a gap in the archive which, alongside her gender and location, could contribute to the artist’s relative underrepresentation in Western Europe. The focus, however, remains on her best-known sculptures, works which we as viewers participate in and complete through our own movement among them.
The Reticulárea are also the works here contextualised, on the same scale and ‘stature’ as Penetrables of the artist’s South American contemporaries in Brazil, like Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel (a Swiss-German), and Hélio Oiticica. Whilst others went to Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, to study, Gego did the reverse. And whilst this exhibition moves too, with simultaneous displays in Mexico City and São Paolo, it could not tour to Venezuela due to the current political climate, despite Gego’s popular status - the country’s Picasso, says Gutiérrez-Guimarães, recalling the artist currently on view in their other galleries in Bilbao. Measuring Infinity thus speaks as much to contemporary as historic realities, and how truths can often be spoken through migration and in diasporas.
Still, her position in and relationship to South America could be further explored - particularly, as Mary Schneider Enriquez suggests, how South American women artists had a higher profile than their US contemporaries, challenging Western/European definition (and superiority) of what makes ‘progressive’ politics and cultures.
Gego joins Clark, Eva Hesse, and soon, Tarsila do Amaral, as an older woman artist often overlooked but now afforded time and space at the Guggenheim galleries. This interdisciplinary curation is crucial for more intersectional understandings of the individual and wider history; Amor highlights how art historians tend to ‘bypass’ these artists’ feminist history, and read their practices exclusively in terms of ‘Third World’ modernism.
Gego is an artist who refused categorisation by movement, whose work focused as much on the ‘in-between’ empty spaces as the clear line. Her century-spanning practice was holistic, both big and intimate; a powerful point at a time when women are still often expected or curated as working only in the latter. Her practice helps pluralise – and perhaps even make infinite – our viewpoints.
Gego: Measuring Infinity was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is now on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao until 4th February 2024.
Measuring Infinity borrows its name from the Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada, and a work penned in homage to Gego’s Reticulárea (1969-1982). These large-scale, abstract sculptural installations are the artist’s best-known work, exhibited simultaneously, or in parallel, between Venezuela, Germany, and the US.
Born in 1912, Gertrud Goldschmidt trained as an architect and engineer in Hamburg and Stuttgart, Germany. On the advice of her teachers, she fled the oncoming Nazi persecution in 1930s, she migrated to Caracas, Venezuela, while her family moved to England. 28 years old, Gego didn’t know Spanish: ‘I had a visa, and that was important!’
Kinetics became central to Gego’s practice in sculpture. But the wider context of that first movement, the intercontinental connections between Europe and South America, is not a focus of this new exhibition of her work in the Basque Country. Rather, Gego is posited as a unique individual in ‘Latin America’ (save for the references to her formative relationship with Gerd Leufert, a Lithuanian artist).
A touring exhibition, this final iteration of Measuring Infinity at the Guggenheim Bilbao is smaller than the first at the institution in New York. Co-curator Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, of the former, speaks of her Peruvian-American heritage, and how this shared history of migration has helped her connect with the artist. These subtleties are reflected in the curation, with a wealth of archive materials, and little nods to Gego’s personality; many more can be found in the institution’s online archive of videos and interviews, which also engage with the politics of estates.
Though condensed, attention is paid to the history of post-war Venezuela, and its ‘vanguardist’, experimental artistic community. As one of the world’s leading oil exporters, and with economic assistance from the US, the government was able to finance its own modernisation in both construction and culture. Parallel lines, a key feature in Gego’s practice, can also be found between politicised art movements, such as Geometric Abstraction and Cinetismo (Kinetic Art).
The military coup in 1948, and the resulting decade of the authoritarian dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, is here nuanced, a ‘paradoxical’ period of both political repression and cultural expansion. Archive photographs and drawings of ambitious government infrastructure projects, such as the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1951), are presented with great respect, an unfortunate rarity for works on paper. This building in particular is presented as an ‘unprecedented experiment’ in cross-cultural collaboration, bringing together Venezuelan, North American, and European artists.
Such projects – of a similar scale to those of Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil, and the collaborative exhibitions of the Casablanca Art School in Morocco – influenced Gego’s public practice in Caracas. With their monumental scale and structural complexity, her public artworks and architecture commissions hold a critical, yet often overlooked, position in her artistic development. Yet the works on paper presented here are crucial, the key to understanding her integrated, interdisciplinary practice. Indeed, though the line is central to Gego’s artworks, historians like Mónica Amor consider it as a route to movement, a line which connects and constellates.
Gego was an active participant in the Venezuelan arts community. Her children - now guardians of her estate, and active in the curation - talk about growing up in a house filled with artists and friends. It is reflected in her work in education and pedagogical approach (though, in captions which afford her individual personality and complexity, we understand she saw these practices as distinct). As a Professor of Fine Arts at the IDD (INCE) in Caracas, she often published with her students, resisting the binaries of age in her intergenerational collaboration. Again, this is subtly reflected in the exhibition’s research room and catalogue, designed by a former student.
Like the Reticulárea, designed to be exhibited together, Gego must be situated amongst her contemporaries, including Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Whilst she, a new mother, designed and constructed her first family home in Venezuela, her last home and studio with her partner, Penthouse B, was produced by the Venezuelan architect Jimmy Alcock. Conspicuously absent is Ruth Asawa, whose residencies at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles overlapped; Gutiérrez-Guimarães hints at her ongoing struggle to establish whether the two ever met in America.
The exclusive focus on the artist is deserved for this space, but viewing some of her contemporaries may help to put her early practice into context. Gego is best known for her stark monochrome, but the exhibition begins with her colourful, figurative works from her relocation to Tarmas, a rural village near the Caribbean coast. These hazy landscapes are akin to Peter Doig paintings; curated in conversation with her scenes of Europe, this section quietly speaks to the artist’s twin European and South American identities.
Implicit in their industrial, metalwork sculptures is the artist’s admiration for the ‘radical structure’ of nature. This respect for natural, under-recognised, geometric patterns is evident in her experimentation with different materials and titles. Some of her other works refer to tumbleweeds, similarly marginalised, perhaps her way of resisting the hierarchy of forms.
We get only glimpses of her wider work in furnishings, lamps, and textiles, many of which no longer survive; a gap in the archive which, alongside her gender and location, could contribute to the artist’s relative underrepresentation in Western Europe. The focus, however, remains on her best-known sculptures, works which we as viewers participate in and complete through our own movement among them.
The Reticulárea are also the works here contextualised, on the same scale and ‘stature’ as Penetrables of the artist’s South American contemporaries in Brazil, like Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel (a Swiss-German), and Hélio Oiticica. Whilst others went to Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, to study, Gego did the reverse. And whilst this exhibition moves too, with simultaneous displays in Mexico City and São Paolo, it could not tour to Venezuela due to the current political climate, despite Gego’s popular status - the country’s Picasso, says Gutiérrez-Guimarães, recalling the artist currently on view in their other galleries in Bilbao. Measuring Infinity thus speaks as much to contemporary as historic realities, and how truths can often be spoken through migration and in diasporas.
Still, her position in and relationship to South America could be further explored - particularly, as Mary Schneider Enriquez suggests, how South American women artists had a higher profile than their US contemporaries, challenging Western/European definition (and superiority) of what makes ‘progressive’ politics and cultures.
Gego joins Clark, Eva Hesse, and soon, Tarsila do Amaral, as an older woman artist often overlooked but now afforded time and space at the Guggenheim galleries. This interdisciplinary curation is crucial for more intersectional understandings of the individual and wider history; Amor highlights how art historians tend to ‘bypass’ these artists’ feminist history, and read their practices exclusively in terms of ‘Third World’ modernism.
Gego is an artist who refused categorisation by movement, whose work focused as much on the ‘in-between’ empty spaces as the clear line. Her century-spanning practice was holistic, both big and intimate; a powerful point at a time when women are still often expected or curated as working only in the latter. Her practice helps pluralise – and perhaps even make infinite – our viewpoints.
Gego: Measuring Infinity was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is now on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao until 4th February 2024.
