Gego: Origin and Encounter, Mastering the Space at Americas Society
Gego: Origin and Encounter, Mastering the Space at Americas Society
The Drawing Center writes about Gego’s bold exploration across various artistic mediums. The artist´s earliest works are presented in Gego: Origin and Encounter, Mastering the Space at the Americas Society until December 8.
Gego—the German-born, Venezuela-transplanted artist also known as Gertrude Goldschmidt—careened fearlessly across media throughout her career, working in sculpture, collage, installation and textiles. However, she ultimately considered her work to be based in drawing. This continual return to drawing as an originary medium was the subject of The Drawing Center’s 2007 exhibition Gego, Between Transparency and the Invisible. This fall through December 8th, Americas Society presents an exhibition that begins with the artist’s earliest works on paper and highlights her forays into textiles as well as the development of her singular Reticuláreas: huge, spider web-like constructions of wires that feel vast and light at the same time.
A reticule is a net of lines used for measurement in the eyepiece of a sighting device such as a telescope or microscope; a common example is the crosshairs of a gun. Gego’s Reticuláreas—her own neologism—splay and disperse the grid across their environments, taking over the rooms they inhabit. Americas Society’s exhibition, Gego: Origin and Encounter, Mastering the Space, takes its title from a statement Gego made about the potential of the work to “master the space that reason dominates (or tries to)....”
