Ollin

Gego

Chorro
Chorro
DrawingWithoutPaper
DrawingWithoutPaper
Reticularea
Reticularea
Tejedura
Tejedura

Gego (Hamburg, 1912 to Caracas, 1994) was born Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt and took her diploma in architecture and engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, where she studied under Paul Bonatz. She was Jewish, and in 1939 she left Germany for Venezuela with little more than that training. She worked for years in Caracas as an architect, a furniture maker and an industrial designer, became a Venezuelan citizen in 1952, and only then turned to art. Her first sculptures are from 1957, when she was in her middle forties. The name is the two halves of her own: Gertrud Goldschmidt.

She arrived in the middle of a country that was building itself in a hurry and making a confident geometric art to match. Her friends and contemporaries were making kinetic art out of repeated modules, painted in series, engineered to be exact. Gego kept a certain distance from all of it, and refused every label anyone offered her, including the one for what she made: "Sculpture, three-dimensional forms of solid material. Never what I make."

What she made instead was line. In 1967 she took up stainless steel wire, which is thin, springy, and needs no foundry: it let her work alone, without welders or blacksmiths. To join it she worked out a system of ties, and of wires twisted at their ends so several could meet at one point, and from then on the joining was done by her own hands, one node after another.

That brought her, in June 1969, to the Reticulárea at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas: modules of wire, most of them triangles, tied into a continuous net that spanned the ceiling and came down the walls until the room itself was inside it. It has no center, no row, and no repeated part, and it holds together by the intensity of its nodes rather than by a frame. Nothing about it is fixed, either: she took it down and tied it up again for one room after another between 1969 and 1982, and a permanent version lives at the Galería de Arte Nacional in Caracas. Visitors described walking into it as walking into weather. A reviewer at the time called her a web-fairy.

From about 1976 she made the Dibujos sin papel, drawings without paper, and the title is the argument. They are small pieces of bent wire and studio scrap, cork and thread and springs and nails and bits of tubing, hung a short distance off the wall. The wire is the line and the wall is the paper, and when the light falls on one the shadow it throws is the other half of the drawing. She went on making them until 1988.

In 1971 she made the Chorros, the jets or waterfalls: eighteen tall falls of aluminum and steel rods, each rod a hand's span to an arm's length, their ends bent into small loops so one hooks into the next, hung from a point in the ceiling and let down to the floor, where whatever was left over lay out across the boards. She never fixed how the ends would lie. The rods settled as they settled, and each time the piece was hung it settled differently, which was the point. They were shown together for the first time at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1971, filling the room so that visitors had to pick their way between them.

At the very end, from 1988 to 1991, when her hands could no longer bend and tie wire, she went back to paper, but not to draw on. The Tejeduras, the weavings, are small sheets woven out of strips of paper, weft over warp the way cloth is made, and the strips came from whatever was on the table: pages of magazines and leaflets, the foil and the gold bands of cigarette packets, and her own prints, cut up. The weave is the plain one, over and under, except where she let a strip run over two or three crossings before it dived, and a print cut into strips and woven this way is still the print, with some of it under the foil.

She taught, too, at the School of Architecture of the Universidad Central de Venezuela and for years at the Instituto de Diseño of the Fundación Neumann, where she was a founding member and brought her own Bauhaus schooling to Venezuelan architects and designers. Her other series carry the same hand into different shapes: the Troncos that stand, and the Esferas, spheres of rod and node hung from a single thread.

She belongs in this set because she is the clearest case of an artist whose work is a structure and a drawing at the same time. A net of rods hanging under gravity is a thing a simulation is good at; a line that thins as it goes away from you is a thing a renderer is good at; and her work is exactly where those two meet.

Learn more:

Recreations here

  • Reticularea: after the Reticulárea (1969 to 1982). A net tied out of irregular triangles, hung at eight points, six on the ceiling and two a meter below it out at the sides, and left to gravity. The points it is built on are scattered with a density that knots up in some places and opens out in others, joined to their neighbors, and any triangle too big for a hand to have tied is dropped, which is what leaves the edge frayed rather than cut. The triangles that remain are the net, and they are handed to the simulation exactly as they are drawn, so nothing invisible holds it up. There is a good deal more net than the ties are spread over, so it has to fall into folds and come down at the sides. The air in the room moves the ties, and the whole net moves with them. nodes is how fine the net is, openings how much of it was left out, air how much the room moves, and orbit how fast you walk around it. Drag a wire to take hold of it.
  swift run Example-Recreations-Gego-Reticularea

Two frames of the same net from a fixed eye, which is what the net's invariants are read from. Each node's dot is sized by how far off it is, so the drawing carries its own depth and the wires can be measured as wires:

  swift run Example-Recreations-Gego-Reticularea --export-svg a.svg --frame 600 --param orbit=0 --seed 4181
  swift run Example-Recreations-Gego-Reticularea --export-svg b.svg --frame 780 --param orbit=0 --seed 4181
  • DrawingWithoutPaper: after the Dibujos sin papel (about 1976 to 1988). A lattice of wire that used to be a grid, bent out of true by hand, hanging a few centimeters off the wall while a lamp crosses in front of it. Every point of the wire carries how far off the wall it is, and its shadow is where the ray from the lamp through that point lands, so the frame, which stands off furthest, is thrown furthest, and the shadow is never a copy of the piece. Wires go in one at a time until the piece is made, and then it hangs. The air moves the wire by a millimeter and the shadow by rather more, which is the thing the work is about. pace is how fast it is made, lampDistance how far the lamp stands off the wall, sweep how long it takes to cross, and air how much the room moves.
  swift run Example-Recreations-Gego-DrawingWithoutPaper

One frame as marks, which is what the shadow's invariants are read from: every wire, its shadow, and the lamp lie on one line, so the drawing says where the lamp was:

  swift run Example-Recreations-Gego-DrawingWithoutPaper --export-svg piece.svg --frame 900
  • Tejedura: after the Tejeduras (1988 to 1991). A print of one of her nets, pulled twice: the impression on the left is kept whole, and the one on the right is cut into warp strips of uneven width and woven with strips of foil from a cigarette packet, weft over warp, at pace strips a second. The rhythm is the plain one, over and under, broken at the rate breaks where a strip runs over two or three crossings before it dives. Every cell of the weave shows whichever strip is on top there, and where the warp shows it is the print's own lines and dots cut to that cell, so the print goes on reading through the foil. Below the weft the warp still hangs bare and shows the whole print. When a sheet is done it rests, and then another print is pulled and cut. strips is how fine the cut is, foil which packet the weft came from, and nodes how fine the print is.
  swift run Example-Recreations-Gego-Tejedura

One finished sheet as marks, which is what the weave's invariants are read from: every foil rect is one cell, every strip's width is inside the cut's range, every row keeps the rhythm but for its breaks, and every piece of ink is the impression's own line cut to its cell:

  swift run Example-Recreations-Gego-Tejedura --export-svg sheet.svg --frame 900 --seed 7
  • Chorro: after the Chorros (1971). falls chains of rods, each rod a rigid body hooked to the next at a ball joint, hang from a small plate a little over four meters up, splay as they leave it, are tied together by short rods into rings and triangles at tiers heights on the way down, and drop until they reach the floor, where whatever is left of reach lies out across it. The air moves the plate a few centimeters and the whole fall with it. Each rod is a line, thinner and paler the further off it is, with a dot at every hook and a loop at every free end, and the far rods are laid down before the near ones. Drag a rod to take hold of it.
  swift run Example-Recreations-Gego-Chorro

Two frames of the same fall from a fixed eye, which is what its invariants are read from. Each hook's dot is sized by how far off it is, so the drawing carries its own depth and every rod can be measured as a rod: the same length in both frames, none longer than the cut, every hook hanging from the plate through rods, and the ends lying on the floor:

  swift run Example-Recreations-Gego-Chorro --export-svg a.svg --frame 600 --param orbit=0 --seed 7
  swift run Example-Recreations-Gego-Chorro --export-svg b.svg --frame 900 --param orbit=0 --seed 7

These are homages after Gego, made for learning. They are not reproductions of specific works, they are not affiliated with or endorsed by the artist's estate or the Fundación Gego, and none of her work was used to make them.

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