Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), german-born designer and sculptor, developed an artistic practice that has close ties to architecture, furniture design, quantum physics, mathematics, and European modernism. This allowed her to combine with the height of geometric abstractionism and kinetic art in Latin America, which made her one of the most important artists of the 20th century in Venezuela.
Gego's works and installations are based on the spectator's participation, action and movement as constitutive principles of production. She was author of numerous works, including paintings, sculptures, installations, architectural projects, public interventions, drawings and engravings.
The different works of Gego are based on the decomposition of volumes to their minimum expression, to be captured in a variety of supports or environments. We can see works in which discontinuous lines are superimposed to produce uninhabited atmospheres, but at the same time manage to create the effect of movement. This exercise leads us to one of the main themes Gego constantly addresses in her work: the movement that generates the non-visible.
The artist's work is characterized in part by the experimentation of lines in space, conceived as the most elemental unit of drawing. Gego conceptually resized the function of the line as a way of expression, as a constructive element of the composition and as a system of relationship with space. This is largely visible in her drawings, where Gego made essays that would culminate, sometimes, in ideas for larger projects.
It is drawing, in particular, that not only provides the foundation for Gego's art, but very often serves as a catalyst for her more radical interventions in space. Whether in lines on paper or by projecting them into space, Gego tried to, in her own words, "make the invisible visible".
In the drawings we can see how Gego made of the lines both a visual and conceptual instrument whose objective was to achieve transparency within the work. The artist was assembling, crisscrossing, twisting, snaking and cutting lines of varied strokes, until generating, throughout the process, planes that are active and illusory.
The sensation of transparency is possible due to the intermediate spaces that unfold between and under the lines. The line became something more than a succession of marks between two points; it became the active link that turns the transparent into something real. With this, Gego managed to bring the presence of the "non-visible" to mind.
Gego's work is impressive for having the property of not being delimited in space. The artist's proposals do not adapt to the environment, but rather "create" it. In this group of pieces we can see precisely this procedure. We see the use of the drawn line as a path of the artist's concerns about the creation of a spatial sense.
It is in the drawing where we can see Gego creating depths on flat surfaces without resorting to perspective. By turning the invisible into something visible, Gego contributed to break with the predominant rigor of geometric abstraction. This makes her one of the most influential figures in contemporary Latin American art.