Gego: Works for Sale, Upcoming Auctions & Past Results

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Gego

Venezuelan  •  1912-1994

Biography

Venezuelan artist Gego is internationally recognized as a leading female figure of abstraction in Latin America. Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt) studied architecture and worked as a draughtsman in various firms in Germany before immigrating to Venezuela in 1939.

Gego's experimentation with pure abstraction in the late 1950s culminated in her most important series, produced in the 1980s, titled Dibujos sin Papel (Drawings Without Paper). In this series, she utilized industrial materials in suspended wire sculptures. These seemingly banal yet technically sophisticated sculptures are representative of the artist's mature style and were undoubtedly informed by her training as an architect. With the series Reticulárea ambiental, Gego built upon the Dibujo sin Papel and further highlighted her interest in spatial abstraction by creating expansive, engulfing sculptures of metal scraps.

Insights

  • The Galería de Arte Nacional in Caracas, Venezuela holds a permanent collection of Reticuláreas, her most popular series in which she interweaves and layers pieces of aluminum and steel to create seemingly endless webs that fill the room.

  • Since 1958, Gego has had over 20 solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Drawing Center, New York and the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.

  • Founded by her relatives in 1994, The Fundación Gego gave permission to publish her personal writings and testimonies in 2005 — with the aim of promoting Gego's contribution to the art world with her innovative mode of sculpture.

"The creator is involved in a continuous process of discovery...of the roots of the universe which he has been able to discover within himself."

Past Lots

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