Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt\u2019s childhood nickname, later adopted professionally) is virtually unknown in the narrative of North American modern art. In 1939, Gego, a German Jew trained as an architect, fled fascism to settle in Caracas, Venezuela. She began to make art in her adopted country in the 1950s, when post-war modernism reigned. Midiendo el infinito<\/em> (Measuring Infinity) chronicles her practice from her earliest representational watercolours to the last body of small figurative works, titled Bichos <\/em>(Creatures). Gego\u2019s practice included drawings, two- and three-dimensional structures, prints, books, installations, and large-scale architectural commissions. She wrote, \u201cI discovered the charm of the line, in and of itself,\u201d and at the heart of her career was playing with the line and its manifold potential.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Deployed as an active agent that generates space\u200a\u2014\u200aunlike the line of the architect (Gego\u2019s former trade), which serves as partition or enclosure, or the line of the sculptor, which serves to circumscribe form and mass\u200a\u2014\u200aGego\u2019s line \u201cpasses through,\u201d intersecting and gathering according to a nascent logic that hinges on the improvisational. The line\u2019s actions create structures that are neither real nor symbolic; the open, loosely held together gestural schemas are rendered by its essential mobility. This mobility, this trait of nimbleness, commits the line to infinite variation and deviation. I regard Gego\u2019s works as spatial propositions, a little like virtual wireframe models, pledged not to the real but to what she termed the \u201ctransparent\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200athe \u201creserve\u201d from which still more propositions are engendered and enabled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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