About Gego

Gego (b. 1912) was a German-born artist who fled to Venezuela in 1939. Before leaving Germany, she was trained in architecture at the University of Stuttgart, the subject she eventually taught at the Central University in Caracas. In moving to Caracas, Gego learned the language, took odd jobs before her appointment, and slowly assimilated. This combination of motifs—movement, migration, resettling, the limits of language, translation—are central to Gego’s work, which includes wire sculptures, line drawings, weavings, watercolors, and more. Her work was dedicated to a reconceptualization of the line not as the wheelhouse of reason, telos, and origin, but as this inescapable condition of movement to the human condition. Her lines are a coming to terms with the kinetic and interstitial logic of life found not only in the biology and ecology of a world, but also the social and political domains that, based on her experience, were always subject to the upheaval and dispersal of the body politic. Gego’s lines, then, radiate energy as though there were not grand outer limits binding and containing the lines. Lines were not their own limits, but rather the possibilities of commingling in a field of difference.

This is perhaps most emanant in her work Reticulárea (Gego’s neologism referring to the relation between reticule and area). Reticulárea is a spatialized sculpture that use thin wire to reanimate a gallery space, creating gaps and orientations that remind the space of an always present and collectively experienced movement. She raises questions about the notion of drawing—meaning both the act of making a mark as well as pulling—and how it can be done without a surface without paper. These lines, suspended in the air and supported by other lines, demonstrate a field of difference, for as a viewer moves in the space they align new reticulations just repositioning; it is in the body’s movement that new possibilities are formed.

Reticulárea reminds the viewer not only of their affect on other lines, but also of the lines that their own bodies form in space, filling dimensions and leaving voids. These works appear as networks—or perhaps “meshworks” as Tim Ingold names the interwoven world over an interconnected world—and in this way they equally demonstrate relations formed by lines as the empty space in-between them. She writes: “I discovered the charm of the line in and of itself—the line in space as well as the line drawn on a surface, and the nothing between the lines and the sparkling when they cross, when they are interrupted, when they are of different colors or different types. I discovered that sometimes the in-between-lines is as important as the line by itself.”