At The Guggenheim, Gego Shines As One Of The Greatest Overlooked Artists Of Her Era

Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 with little more than an architecture diploma in her pocket, Gertrud Goldschmidt found scant opportunity for a female immigrant to design buildings in her adopted Venezuela. She became an artist.

An expansive retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum shows how much was gained by her change in profession. Magisterial in its own right, the art she created from the 1950s through the ‘90s reframed architecture in ways that are only now gaining widespread recognition. Working under the name Gego, Goldschmidt ingeniously liberated architecture from the hefty constraints of bricks and mortar. In their place, often working with nothing more than spools of wire, Gego fabricated space.

From the outset, Gego drew on architectural draftsmanship as a basis for her art. Geometric abstraction was popular in ‘50s Venezuela, and the work of her contemporaries often had architectural qualities. But Gego had no intention of applying her skillset to others’ aesthetics. Drafting was not a means to an end, artistic or architectural. Geometry was not abstract for her, nor was it representational. Laid out in the physical realm, geometry was itself the fabric of reality.

Many of Gego’s early works began with the architectural convention of crosshatching. In drafting, parallel lines can be used to describe solids in three dimensions. Gego rendered her parallel lines in metal, and shaped them into tangible structures, in works that she emphatically insisted were not sculpture. (“Three-dimensional forms of solid material. Never what I do!” she declared.)

Gego’s defensiveness was understandable in early works such as Gegofón (1959), a tabletop piece made with rows of stiff iron rods that could be comfortably situated alongside contemporaneous geometric sculptures by artists such as Jesús Rafael Soto. But by the 1970s, her independence from sculptural conventions was self-evident, a distinction most dramatically realized in her Dibujos sin Papel (“paperless drawings”) and her Reticuláreas (“areas of nets”).

Created over a period of twelve years, the Dibujos extended Gego’s way of drafting to its logical conclusion. Mounted on the wall, these wire-based works emphatically set lines free from their conventional two-dimensional support, accentuating their autonomy by allowing them to cast their own shadows. The move was not only conceptual. The Dibujos are also visually beguiling, playfully flaunting their philosophical ambiguity.

The radicality of these works is perhaps best appreciated by considering the artist’s own point of view. “I was trained as an architect, committed to draw lines with a definite meaning, lines that determine forms or spaces as symbols of limits, never with a life of their own,” Gego wrote. “Many years later I discovered the charm of the line in and of itself.”

The Reticuláreas transfer “the line in and of itself” from the domain of drawing into the architectural realm. Laboriously created by hand from countless interlinked segments of steel or aluminum wire, these geometric nets encompass entire rooms, subtlely redefining their volume. On one level, the redefinition is physical. The nets literally get in the way, preventing people from moving freely as walls would in brick-and-mortar architecture. But the redefinition is also illusionistic, because the wire-mesh grids are irregularly articulated. Viewers interpret them perspectivally, and the perspective is decidedly non-Euclidian. The effect can be as vertiginous as virtual reality, or more so because the mind knows that this enigmatic space actually exists in the world, as real as the viewer him- or herself.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Gego made a significant number of large-scale artworks for public spaces in Venezuela, grappling with entire buildings as an artist. As with her self-contained works and room-size installations, these public sculptures defied sculptural conventions, essentially merging into the architecture they were commissioned to embellish.

One of the most remarkable, completed in 1972, stretched triangles of rope across Parque Centrale, a complex of brutalist buildings in central Caracas. The form was inspired by her Reticuláreas, set free from the confines of a gallery. The concrete buildings become nothing more than moorings for autonomous geometric forms: reality rendered subservient to illusion.

Gego titled her work Cuerdas [Estructuras Aéreas Ambientales], which can be translated as “Ropes [Environmental Aerial Structures]”. It’s an apt description that also encapsulates her lifelong ambition to transcend the distinction between structure and environment. Regardless of the materials she chose to make her art, Gego was fundamentally an architect of air.