The sociopolitical vicissitudes of the 20th century, the horror of Nazi persecution, took Gertrud Goldschmidt from Germany to Venezuela and from the field of architecture to art. Gego, as she is known, became an artist at a late age, at 41 years old, and for four decades she carved out a career that would make her one of the great references of the second half of the 20th century. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao now offers the Gego exhibition. Measuring the infinite, which after passing through New York brings closer the work of this pioneer of abstraction.
The retrospective is made up of nearly 150 pieces dating from the beginning of the 1950s, when he made the leap into the art world, until the beginning of the 90s. The exhibition includes sculptures, drawings, engravings, textiles and artist books, as well as photographic images of installations and public works, sketches, publications and letters.
Through this exhibition, the Guggenheim Museum pays tribute to “one of the most significant artists on the Latin American scene of the second half of the 20th century,” whose work was not adequately recognized at the time. “The exhibition follows our desire to recover the work of unjustly obscured women, who have not had the recognition they deserved,” explained Juan Ignacio Vidarte, director of the museum.
The curator of the exhibition, Geanine Gutiérrez-Guimaraes, has also highlighted this aspect. “She is a woman, Latin American… fits very well with programming dedicated to global art and presenting forgotten or marginalized stories, especially with women's art and more so in the case of Latin American women. She was going to be an architect, but for sociopolitical reasons she becomes an artist,” she explained.
Gertrud Goldschmidt (Hamburg, 1912-Caracas, 1994) was the protagonist of a particular artistic journey, "markedly individual" and that "resists any categorization." The exhibition aims to offer a synthesis of that trajectory and has been organized chronologically and theme.
The first works shown date from his early years in Venezuela.
Trained in architecture and engineering at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart (currently the University of Stuttgart), with the start of the Second World War she emigrated to Venezuela, where she settled permanently.
In those years, the Latin American country experienced an economic flourishing, thanks to the export of oil, which is reflected in art. Geometric abstraction emerges, “an international movement characterized by the use of pure form, line and color and geometric structures, marking a period of great creative innovation.”
It is in this context that Gego decides to abandon architecture and dedicates himself entirely to artistic production. His first works are related to the representation of landscape, architectural forms and figuration, as can be seen in the work.
The Venezuelan artistic context, however, would soon influence the artist. Geometric abstraction and kineticism, a movement that emerged there in the 1960s, lead Gego to experience “the spatial and structural possibilities of what she calls parallel lines.” She begins to experiment with the optical effects of oscillation and vibration and synthesizes her explorations around light, movement and space. From those years, the works grouped in the parallel lines section of the exhibition emerge, many of them sculptures, mostly made of welded and painted iron, that present parallel tubular elements that form geometric planes that overlap or intersect.
His biography continued to shape his artistic career in the mid-60s, when he moved to Los Angeles and immersed himself in the field of lithography, a few years of experimentation to which the exhibition dedicates a specific section.
The section Jets, Trunks, Spheres and other typologies in a grid, meanwhile, shows a selection of hanging sculptures by Gego that synthesize the notion of a “measured infinite”, a poetic oxymoron used by the Venezuelan poet Alfredo Silva Estrada in his poem Variations on reticuláreas (1979), in homage to Gego.
These sculptures evoke the artist's experimentation around “structure, space, light, shadow, line and grid.” In this section, the visitor will be able to see works suspended vertically in the central space of the room, minimalist sculptures that highlight themes such as "fragility, gravity and transparency", and that "allow us to understand the formal evolution of the artist."
The minimalist sculptures in Drawings without Paper, another section, challenge the concept of autonomy of sculpture by subordinating the work to the wall, “thus attributing the two-dimensional qualities of the drawing to the three-dimensional form.”
The exhibition closes with Gego's three latest series: Tejeduras, small, two-dimensional pieces made with intertwined strips of paper from his own works, magazines and brochures; Bugs, which represents “the deformation and total collapse of geometry, form and grid”; and Bichitos, created with recovered materials and elements from other works.
The Gego exhibition. Mindiendo el Infinito can be visited until February 4.
