Ruth Vollmer & Gego: Thinking the Line (opening)

The sculptors, Ruth Vollmer and Gego, who emigrated to North and South America in the 1930s, examine the interfaces between two-dimensional graphics and three-dimensional geometric sculpture. Bridging the American avant-garde of the 1960s and European Modernism, they transform modular systems involving sculptures and drawings into open geometrical abstractions that consistently generate new shapes. Gego’s substantial wire sculptures and Ruth Vollmer’s complex, mathematically based sculptures herald a numerical sensitivity that is crucial for the understanding of space in the age of the media.

The ZKM Karlsruhe is exhibiting sculptures, drawings and books produced over a period of 30 years by the Biennale artist Gertrude Goldschmidt, alias Gego, [b. 1912, Hamburg – d. 1994, Caracas] as well as sculptures and drawings by Ruth Vollmer [b. 1903, Munich – d. 1982, New York]. Supplementing the exhibits is experimental film material from the 1960s and 70s that was inspired by the artists’ sculptures.

The exhibition is subsequently being staged at the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria from 3 July to 29 August 2004.

An extensive catalogue comprising a selection of hitherto unpublished texts, photo-reportages and accounts by contemporary witnesses will be published when the series of exhibition ends in 2005.