“Yo siempre había tenido sueños sobre reticuláreas entre rascacielos." (I always dreamed of Reticuláreas among skyscrapers.)
Resisting a clear insertion into art historical narratives, Gego’s sculptures elude categorization. Instead, they assert themselves as self-contained and non-discursive objects. Embodying the anti-canonical—a counter figure to cinetismo—as stated by Perez Oramas (“Gego y la escena analitica del cinetismo,” in Hector Olea y Mari-Carmen Ramirez, Heterotopias: Medio Siglo sin Lugar, 1918-1968 (Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2000, 248), Gego is one of the few artists from her generation who resisted the allure of the optical and the kinetic, preserving instead a committed pursuit for the impermanence and exigencies of the line.
Simultaneously working within the system and the periphery, Gego’s production remained autonomous from the all-encompassing influence of Jesus Rafael Soto, Alejandro Otero, and Carlos Cruz Diez, the three leading geometric artists who exerted enormous authority within the artistic circles of Caracas during the 1960-1970s. While producing her work in solitary, a mostly self-imposed alienated practice, Gego was keenly aware of the local tendencies regarding kinetic and geometric abstraction and the necessity of the spectator for completing these works through retinal stimulation. It now seems predetermined that it was in the dynamic cultural milieu of Caracas that Gego was able to reimagine the constructivist lessons of European modernism and ingeniously apply them towards her own idiosyncratic brand of organic experimentation.
The only two existing and surviving models of Nube (red ambiental), a fully realized environmental sculpture originally installed in Pasaje Concordia in Caracas in 1973, these exquisitely rare and unique objects were a gift by the artist to the father of the present owner for his collaboration in constructing this important public commission.
Right: Nube (Red ambiental), Pasaje Concordia, Caracas, 1974
Inseparable, both pieces correspond to each other and are to be installed together. Notably, art historians Iris Peluga and Hannia Gomez have stated that in terms of their visual language, construction and spatial conception, these singular works clearly exist within the systems of Reticuláreas Cuadradas executed between 1971-1976. A sole witness to the now lost public installation from which they first emerged, the present Nubes categorically assert an extraordinary moment in Gego’s body of work: the integration of suspended reticulareas within the realm of architecture.
“Although Gego decided not to produce any other environmental reticulareas, she considered Reticuláreas all works based on the idea of the mesh or the network, even if they were individual works, not environmental, even if their modules were not triangular but square. And given their ability to grow and combine, even if they are presented as individual pieces, they can be considered as potential environments. In fact, they were often presented in ensembles, in which case the viewer was invited to enter them. Considered in this way, the perception provided by these works (meshes or nets) is different from that of the previous individual pieces, which appeared as autonomous and individualized objects, separated from the viewer. "
Born in Hamburg, Germany in 1912 into a Jewish family, Gego studied architecture at the Technische Hochshule in Stuttgart. Due to the challenging climate of German Nazi occupation, she was unable to put her academic training into practice, which directed her to seek asylum in the then neutral political landscape of Caracas, Venezuela. Her migration to South America ostensibly provided Gego with the impetus to apply her formal training in mathematics, physics and architecture into an artistic practice that emphasized the line above any other element.
As stated by Mari-Carmen Ramirez, it is here, within the constructs of the elusive line, that Gego “constantly straddles the assertion of the two-dimensional plane and its critical displacement in favor of three dimensionality. The result yields an ambiguous physical and perceptual field, and in between zone were real, subjective, and even cosmic sensations and impulses emerged. In addition, substantial tension exists in the implicit relationship between the rigorous mathematical objectivity that animates Gego’s geoMetricas lly based webs, nets, and wire constructions, and the playful, subjective imagination that constantly undermines her supposedly strict rationality. It is as if the technical engineer in Gego was at odds with the architect- artist in, each one constantly trying to undo the other.” (Questioning the Line: Gego in Context, “Reading Gego Between the Line,” Mari-Carmen Ramirez, 27)
Gego. Instalación de Nube en Pasaje Concordia. Caracas. 1974
Like Nube, the Reticuláreas series (created from 1968 and continued until the mid-1970’s), is rife with the spatial and linear concerns that define the meticulous exactness of the artist’s mind. The National Gallery, Caracas, possesses the masterwork from this series, an entire environment she was commissioned to create in 1969, Reticulárea Ambientación. Here Gego spins a dizzying array of fine stainless-steel filaments into an imaginative web of repeating grids, distorted but interlaced by a resolute anchor. In the present work, each register challenges and resists notions of formulaic hierarchy. The summation of which, denotes volume while it delineates space.
In a similar fashion to her Reticuláreas, Nube is a web of structural co-dependency and is clearly constructed with the spectator in mind. Anchored and hanging in midair, it is an ephemeral self-contained environment that transforms both the space it effortlessly contains, in addition to transforming the space that it occupies. Describings a reticularea, Iris Peruga amply states, “the spectator is invited to enter it, to be a part of it, and to complete it….the artwork proposes a reunification with living space by facilitating the viewer’s integration with it” (Iris Peruga, Gego, “From Matter to Space: The Game of Creation or Creation as Game?” Questioning the Line: Gego in Context, Museum of Replica Handbags s, Houston, 2003, p. 63). The German refugee has thus transcended the postmodern notions of alienation and isolation, by coercing the viewer to not stand outside her scintillating environment, but within it and experience the fragility and universality of its very existence.
Gego’s constant allusions to the organic world of nature is implicit in the title chosen for Nubes (Clouds) or those given to many of her other works: the series she called Troncos (trunk, lock, fustrum), for example, or the one known as Chorros. It is within this organic and yet highly disciplined, mathematical framework that the present work should be contextualized. Understanding Gego beyond her Germanic roots steeped in the Bauhaus tradition, Latin American Art Modernism, and considering her oeuvre as an indirect, yet significant corollary to the fields of Non-Objective, Minimalist, Kinetic, Constructivist Art movements has been recently brought to the fore in monumental exhibitions such as Inverted Utopias at the Museum of Replica Handbags , Houston (June – September 2004), and Beyond Geometry (June – October 2004) at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
“her sculptures have the fluency of visual poetry “spoken” in a geometric idiom, rather than the stiffness of “recited” equations….the sudden erupting of haywire tangles from otherwise orderly configurations, add grace notes to the basic visual chords Gego sounds and the sympathetic vibrations they set off throughout her pieces”
As its name implies, Nubes is an exquisitely ethereal work, an outstanding singular moment in Gego’s mature production chronologically anchored by her famed Reticularia from 1969 and the later series of Troncos begun the same year in 1974. Predating her later Dibujos sin papel from the 1980s, Nubes is a highly original object—the only surviving work from this important commission which served to establish Gego’s public architecture within the framework of Venezuela’s rapid modernization in the 1970s.
Works by Gego in Important Institutional collects ions
