Gego (1912–1994)

Gego (Gertrude Gold-schmidt; b. 1 August 1912; d. 17 September 1994), Venezuelan artist. Trained as an architect, Gego immigrated to Venezuela from her native Germany in 1939. In the latter half of the 1950s, she began to create a geometric sculpture that explored perceptual aspects of planes and volumes. She taught at the Universidad Central de Venezuela from 1958 to 1967 and at the Instituto Nacional de Cooperación Educativa (INCE) from 1964 to 1977. Gego is best known for her innovative abstract works that extend a systematic approach to three-dimensional art into a poetic ineffability. Her Reticuláreas (1969), for example, comprise webs of wire segments that have been hooked together and hung from the ceiling; filling a room, the Reticuláreas confront the viewer with a quasi-geometric and semi-mobile linear articulation of space. Gego's architectural projects have included sculptures at the Banco Industrial de Venezuela, Caracas, in 1962 and (in collaboration with her husband, Gerd Leufert) on the facades of the Sede del INCE in 1969. Her one-woman exhibitions include those in Caracas at the Museo de Bellas Artes in 1961, 1964, 1968, 1969, and 1984; at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in 1977; and at the Galería de Arte Nacional in 1982. Gego died in Caracas.

See alsoArt: The Twentieth Century .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hanni Ossott, Gego (1977).

Marta Traba, Gego (1977).

Ruth Auerbach, Gego: Entre la estructura y el objeto (1988).

Additional Bibliography

Gego. Sabiduras and Other Texts: Writings by Gego, edited by María Elena Huizi and Josefina Manrique. Houston: International Center for the Arts of the Americas; Caracas: Fundación Gego, 2005.

Peruga, Iris, and Josefina Núñez. Gego: obra completa, 1955–1990. Caracas: Fundación Cisneros, 2003.

Ramírez, Mari Carmen, and Héctor Olea, editors. Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Ramírez, Mari Carmen, and Theresa Papanikolas. Questioning the Line: Gego in Context. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts; Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

                                       Joseph R. Wolin