Gego

Private Collection, Caracas (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Museo de Barquisimeto, 5/85, July - August 1985, p. 4, illustrated
Caracas, Complejo Cultural Teresa Carreño, Escultura 85. Encuentro Nacional de Escultores, October - November 1985, p. 11 

Ana María Olalde, Gego. Una Vida de contribución al arte contemporáneo, Caracas 1997, pp. 12-13

This work is in very good and sound condition overall. All of the elements are sound and secure. The wires present an aged surface, with minor scattered areas of oxidation.
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Known simply as Gego, German-born Venezuelan artist Gertrude Goldschmidt produced some of the most daring exercises of aesthetic experimentation in the twentieth century. Profoundly original, Gego’s radical and self-contained practice eludes categorization. A lifetime engagement with drawing as an autonomous medium and a steadfast opposition to conventional art-making models situate her production at the forefront of Latin American abstraction. Fundamentally, Gego's practice celebrates the pleasures and demands of the line. While invariably rational, her works seem to arise spontaneously as if driven by capricious intuitive tensions and ruptures that appear purposely experimental. 

A graduate from the prestigious Technische Hochsule Stuttgart, Gego obtained a degree in Bauhaus and Russian Constructivist Architecture and Engineering in 1938. Fleeing Nazi persecution, she immigrated to Venezuela at the age of twenty-seven, permanently settling in Caracas one year later. There she was introduced to the grand trio of Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Alejandro Otero, artists who spearheaded Kineticism (Cinetismo), the movement that came to dominate Venezuela’s cultural scene from the late 1950s throughout the 1970s. A highly idiosyncratic spirit, Gego’s practice went on to radically contest her contemporaries’ commitment to perceptual and optical processes, phenomenology, color, and virtual movement.

Conceived during the last decades of her life, the present work is an outstanding example from the artist’s Dibujos sin papel (Drawings without Paper) series. Crafted by hand and suspended at a slight distance from the wall, this delicate wire construction reveals its ephemeral materiality by the light shadow it casts against the wall. Artisanal in nature, fragile, and transparent, it contests the industrial canonized principles of Gego’s Constructivist background. 

Mari-Carmen Ramírez, Wortham Curator of Latin-American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has described these drawings in space as consisting of lines that are “liberated as matter…and complemented by the subtle shadows they cast against the wall. What immediately struck me about these pieces was the sheer rarity and at the same time complex sophistication of their alternating proposition: the fluid interplay of positive (wire) and negative (virtual line) elements.” (Mari-Carmen  Ramírez, Questioning the Line: Gego in Context, ICAA 2, Houston, 2013, p. 19)

By the mid-1980s, Gego had achieved an unprecedented degree of formal, conceptual and creative freedom, paying no allegiance to any particular material or element as long as it could be appropriated into her complex configurations. The present Dibujo sin papel 85/17, executed in 1985 at the peak of her artistic maturity, is one of the most accomplished works from this period to have been offered at auction.