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THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON, GIFT OF AT&T.OPPOSITE: GALERIE LELONG, NEW YORKART+AUCTION MARCH 2016 (^) | BLOUINARTINFO.COM
Gego’s open, stainless steel wire
is building upon a Surrealist tradition of
drawing in space. It captures the kind
of informality one might see in a drawing
on a piece of paper, but this is actually a
drawing in space with wire that addresses
the tensions between representation
and illusion and between two- and three-
dimen sional spaces. Like Buckminster
Fuller, Gego was interested in using
repeated geometric forms to capture
space without trying to define it in a
concrete fashion. This Reticulárea, 1975,
is among the largest of the series and
is more fieldlike and immersive, while
others are armatures that come off the
wall and have an engineered, architectural
quality. Still others are more sculptural.
Gego really broke down this boundary
between architectural space, three-
GEGO
dimensional relief surface, and the
support—the wall, a corner, or the floor.
In many respects Gego kept her dis-
tance from the art world, in part because
she had a desire to create her own
language that was not tied to the
neo-constructivist movement of Latin
America, the Surrealism of Europe,
or the Postminimalist work of American
artists that dominated the dialogue
during this period. —PS
Gego was a German émigré to
Venezuela, so she comes out of a cultural
context having nothing to do with femi-
nist thought. She’s a formalist, invested
in the purity of the line, and a peer of
other Venezuelans including Carlos Cruz-
Diez, Alejandro Otero, and Jesús Rafael
Soto, practitioners who have long been
prominent in Latin America but have
only more recently been introduced
to American audiences. Gego was work-
ing with concepts of space—articulating
space or delineating it through wire
constructions. Part of her interest in this
investigation is about endless form
and the idea of proliferating form—the
sculpture can continuously grow or
the work can become room-size in
certain installations and shrink down
for others. It becomes almost like a
netting or a web that fills a space in an
infinite way. All of her works are very
ephemeral and tenuous looking—this is
also what underscores their poetry.
Formal abstraction is key throughout this
exhibition, and Gego’s work serves as a
way station for a large number of women
who use wire as a form of drawing. —JS
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