Gego

Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt (1 August 1912 – 17 September 1994), known as Gego, was a modern German-Venezuelan visual artist. Gego is perhaps best known for her geometric and kinetic sculptures made in the 1960s and 1970s, which she described as "drawings without paper".

Early life Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt, who went by "Gego", was born on 1 August 1912 in Hamburg, Germany into a Jewish family. She was the sixth of seven children of Eduard Martin Goldschmidt and Elizabeth Hanne Adeline Dehn. Although she was the niece of the medieval art historian Adolf Goldschmidt, who taught at the University of Berlin, she decided to attend the Technische Hochschule of Stuttgart in 1932, where she was taught by the well-known German architect Paul Bonatz. In 1938, she earned a diploma in both architecture and engineering.

Because her family was Jewish, life became very difficult once the Nazis gained power in 1933. Her German citizenship was nullified in 1935, and she was forced to leave the country. She found work in 1939 in Venezuela as an architect and gained Venezuelan citizenship in 1952. Her parents and siblings all managed to leave Germany by June 1940 mostly settling in England and California. Some close relatives chose to stay in Germany unaware they would soon be murdered.

In 1987, Professor Frithjof Trapp of the University of Hamburg led an investigation called "Exile and Emigration of Hamburg Jews," which he hoped would explain the lives of these Jews. Gego was one person whom he hoped to investigate. After several letters to her home, she finally agreed to respond but the letter was never mailed and instead stayed in her collection of notes. In her testimony, "Reflection on my origins and encounters in life," Gego described how her family identified with German society. She described, in detail, her education history and her departure from Germany.

Importance of education After moving to Caracas, Venezuela, Gego taught at the College of Architecture and City Planning at the Central University of Venezuela between 1958 and 1967. Gego knew that, after a time of crisis, students become the members of society that are the most influential. Included in her Sabiduras, a folder of her informal writings discovered upon her death, there is a letter addressed to her colleagues explaining the criteria that would be beneficial to the students of Venezuela. In it, she explains that only through experience can artists, and architects in particular, learn their medium: Images and theories about architecture would not further their artistic training. Her views were fueled by her belief that students were taught with too much emphasis on rationality and were becoming "ignorant of imagination."

Gego made her first sculpture in 1957. She was aware of the modern movement when she came to Caracas, but she did not want to simply co-opt the ideas of Kinetic Art, Constructivism or Geometric Abstraction. Instead, Gego wanted to create a style of her own because she was able to use so many aspects of her life in her art—for example, her German heritage. In the end, she saw that these new projects labeled desarrollista (developmentalist movement) were pleasing the elite and members of government, but she wanted an art that would relate to the local community of Venezuela.

The strength or purpose of a line was enhanced by Gego's use of different materials, like steel, wire, lead, nylon and various metals. In addition to relating to her interest in architecture, these materials also contradicted the new modernist movement in Latin America. Gego not only used these materials to create lines in her massive sculptures but also in her series entitled Dibujos Sin Papel (Drawings without Paper). These small works were created from scraps of metal that were bent and weaved together in order to evoke movement, experimentation, and spontaneity.

Gego explained her interest in using non-traditional formats in her printmaking in a speech at Tamarind in 1966: "I think that series of sheets with a coherent meaning must be gathered in a way that they can be easily enjoyed so I make books."

As in her three-dimensional installations, Gego used printmaking as a mode of linear experimentation. She used line, and its infinite variations, to explore negative space, or what she called, the "nothing between the lines." At a reception honoring her at Tamarind in 1966 she explained, "I discovered that sometimes the in-between lines is as important as the lines by [themselves]."

Death and legacy Gego died on 17 September 1994 in Caracas, Venezuela. That same year, her family founded the Fundación Gego to preserve her artistic legacy; it organizes posthumous exhibitions of her artwork and promotes awareness of Gego's significance to the art world. The Fundación Gego gave the permission to publish Gego's personal writings and testimonies in 2005. These writings, now published, may influence other artists in her innovative and experimental mode of sculpture.

Gego's work is in the Museum of Modern Art. Her work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.