Gego

Lines here and there

This small but representative group of works on paper by Gego signals her deep engagement with the multifarious quality of the line on a surface and in space. It also includes prints, which allowed the artist to explore an alternative spatiality of transfer, and a 1955 watercolor made while she lived in Tarma, a small coastal town west of Caracas where she launched her artistic career in dialogue with her partner, the designer Gerd Leufert. Before this liberating period (1953-1956), Gego, who had trained as an architect and engineer at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart and was forced to abruptly abandon her life in Germany, did some design work and ran a furniture workshop in Caracas. These experiences were key to her future aesthetic explorations and her role as a teacher at the school of visual arts, the school of architecture, and the school of design (which she and Leufert helped found) and are nicely represented in two untitled prints subtitled Almanac which, though playful, attest to Gego’s dexterity with calculations and rational organization. It is of course not hard to see that this world of mathematical order and codification imploded in Gego’s art.

It was the artist’s sustained exploration of line, not as the boundary of form but as mark, that led her to probe its multivalent identity: its capacity to flex, bend, twist, coil, direct, form, deform, alter, map, diagram, construct, and undo fixed relations between figure and ground, inside and outside. In this body of work, it is more accurate to speak of lines as both medium and mediation, since this otherwise discrete element common to the fields of architecture, art, design, and writing is deployed by Gego to weave the space in-between these forms of knowledge. Writ large, line in this oeuvre refuses to settle within the confines of a discipline, technique, or support. Instead, it is topological and relational. Topological because, as with figures that can be deformed without losing their properties, Gego’s line stretches, shrinks, knots, warps, and does many other things that even topology does not allow (it tears, interrupts, stops). However, like one of the most intriguing topological figures, the Möbius strip—which consists of a single strip, one end half-twisted and then attached to the other end so that the result is a one-sided surface with no inside and no outside—Gego’s line slides from paper to space and back again as if producing a continuous virtual plane. This accords with the treatment of the in-between lines not as ground but as active space and as increasingly engaging the edge of the support to suggest the line’s extension outside the limits of the plane.