Gego, 1957–1988: Thinking the Line

Venezuelan sculptor Gego (1912–1994) was one of the most important representatives of Latin American geometric abstraction in the mid–twentieth century. Born in Germany as Gertrud Luise Goldschmidt, Gego initially trained as an architect. In 1939, she emigrated to Caracas, where her work in design gradually led to the creation of installations that radically altered the nature of modernist sculpture by actively involving the viewer in the work’s formulation. In her sculptures, Gego countered the deductive logic of modernist abstraction with a fluid conceptualism, reconfiguring »content-less« art into an open-ended process of »thinking the line«.
The most comprehensive examination of Gego’s art published in English to date, this monograph contains in-depth analyses by scholars from various disciplines as well as previously untranslated historical texts, providing new perspectives on the artist’s critical relationship to the avant-garde traditions of the Bauhaus and Russian constructivism, to Venezuelan urbanism and kineticism, and to the postminimalist art of the sixties.