Despite success in Venezuela, émigré artist Gego remains widely unknown… Until now, says Susan Daitch, who reveals more following a major retrospective in NYC
The dates and cities stamped on artist Gego’s passport read like a readymade, some Duchampian object in which many parts of her story are implied without needing to be stated outright. She was born Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt in Hamburg, Germany, in 1912, and fled the country in 1939, by then a young adult working as a furniture designer. Landing in Venezuela, in the post-war years, she studied architecture and, by the end of the 1950s, intrigued by the use of maths and geometry, she turned to abstract sculpture and drawing. By her death in 1994, she had become a renowned artist in her new country, but was far less well known elsewhere. Fortunately this year, nearly three decades after her death, the Guggenheim Museum in New York held a major retrospective of her work, Gego: Measuring Infinity.
Sin título (Untitled) by Gego, ca.1969, courtesy of The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami © Fundación Gego. Photo by Oriol Tarridas, courtesy CIFO Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation
As her work evolved, Gego acknowledged the dominant contemporaneous art movements (kinetic, abstraction), borrowing from a number of boxes, but finally making art that was uniquely hers. Sculptures of precise immovable geometries gave way to wire shapes that could bow and bend, as if shaky pencil drawings made three-dimensional and hung from the ceiling. Formed from steel, lead and other metals, the wire constructions marked a shift from stable to unstable; symmetrical to wobbly and asymmetrical; balanced, then tilting off-centre.
Gego: Measuring Infinity, installation view, 2023. Photo by David Heald © Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation, New York
The Reticulárea series, begun in 1969, filled rooms with their mysterious webbing, casting shadows evocative of fishermen’s nets or massive spider webs folded into cylinders, spheres and lantern-like shapes. Even when the sculptures are still, they convey a sense of motion, a suggestion of organic forms constructed out of geometric units: square, triangle and diamond, as if measuring the impossible to define a concept of infinity. Gego began to name some of these objects 'bichos' or 'bichitos' (bugs or animals), but she thought of her constructions as things that invade a space and called them thinking objects.
Fifty years after she escaped Germany, Professor Frithjof Trapp of the University of Hamburg, began a project to explore the lives of the city’s émigré Jews. He wrote to Gego and, after several attempts, she responded to him, but for reasons unknown, never mailed the letter. Though her history didn’t make it into his Exile and Emigration of Hamburg’s Jews project, her response, entitled Reflections On My Origins and Encounters in Life, was found among her papers, describing her early life in that city and her family’s severed German history.
When the Goldschmidts left Hamburg in 1939, Gego would have been 27 and, that same year, artist Eva Hesse, then a child of three, also departed Hamburg via the Kindertransport. Her parents followed and they were united in England, only to continue their exile, sailing for New York. Both women would go on to be interested in abstraction, the grid and geometry. As if their uprootedness contributed to how they rethought the norms of visual representation, how films are made and stories told, Gego and Hess were part of a group of Jewish women refugees, among them filmmaker Maya Deren and writer Clarice Lispector, to name only two, who reinvented themselves and the language of modernism when they left Europe behind. Some we’ve celebrated and studied in the decades since their deaths, while others, like Gego, are still being discovered.
By Susan Daitch
Header photo: Gego installing Reticulárea, Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, 1969, photo by Juan Santana © Fundación Gego
Gego: Measuring Infinity appeared at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City (Mar-Sep 2023). Susan Daitch is an award-winning author based in Brooklyn. susandaitch.net