Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt)

Born in Germany, Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt) studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart from 1932-38. Shortly after receiving her diploma, she was forced to emigrate to Venezuela because she was Jewish. In Caracas, she then found herself widely unable to pursue a technical career because she was a woman, and turned her attention to fine art, her work evolving from technical and graphic drawing to the intricate, net-like spatial installations or ‘Reticuláreas’ she is best known for.

Printmaking forms an integral part of Gego’s development as an artist, instigated by her time spent at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1963 and 1966. It is through the process of printmaking that she was able to translate her grid-like and linear drawing style, born from her architectural training, into theoretical explorations into invisibility and the creation of space. Printmaking encourages a consciousness of positive and negative space, of the layers of an image, and of a balance between mechanical processes and spontaneous gestures. The print techniques she explored throughout the 1960s encouraged in Gego a concern with the ‘transparent stroke’ - the invisible space between the lines - which went on to become the key concern of her celebrated sculptural practice, an ongoing exploration into the negative spaces within interlaced networks of lines.

Another print from this edition was included in the exhibition ‘Gego. The Architecture of an Artist’ at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, the result of a three-year research project in collaboration with the Fundación Gego with the hopes of preserving key works from her estate, sharing her influential and extensive oeuvre with a European audience and reconnecting her graphic work with her early architectural training in Stuttgart.

Large collections of Gego’s work are held by Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.