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Gertrudis Goldschmidt brings no tintinnabulation of recognition to most contemporary art enthusiasts. Perhaps it is because this female avant-garde artist enjoys the euphonious sobriquet of Gego. She plucked geometric shapes from the wraiths of wiry sculptures to create curious, timeless works of lines and parallelograms. Gego’s unique, sculptural achievements span the entire lower level of Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. At this exhibit, visitors contemplate sculptures, watercolor visualizations and drawings made by an artist once shrouded by her Brazilian cohorts, Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel |
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Gego: Defying Structures
Gertrudis Goldschmidt brings no tintinnabulation of recognition to most contemporary art enthusiasts. Perhaps it is because this female avant-garde artist enjoys the euphonious sobriquet of Gego. She plucked geometric shapes from the wraiths of wiry sculptures to create curious, timeless works of lines and parallelograms.
Gego’s unique, sculptural achievements span the entire lower level of Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. At this exhibit, visitors contemplate sculptures, watercolor visualizations and drawings made by an artist once shrouded by her Brazilian cohorts, Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel. Grounded in an architectural mindfulness courtesy of the University of Stuttgart, Gego emigrated to Caracas in 1939 and began her investigation of lines, planes, shadows and exquisite, asymmetrical assemblages.
This group of groundbreaking artists brought conceptual and constructivist aesthetics to the Latin American art scene during the turgid 1960s. On the cusp of a political imbroglio in Germany, Gego cultivated a stalwart and boundless creative life in her new South American home.
With such an androgynous nickname, perhaps she circumvented many of the obstacles once ubiquitous to burgeoning female artists in Latin American countries. Even in 21st Century Spain, it becomes disappointing to peruse any major travel guide for historical literary and artistic icons only to find that they are entirely male. Gego conjured up the meticulous reduplication of light and levity through finite lines that float through an undefinable dimension. Her incessant quest for the voluminous in the void revives our interest in all that is intangible and elegant in its elusiveness. If art is to be insightful as Hegel emphasized in his early writing, then “Defying Structures” takes a chronological approach to Gego’s lovely praxis of making the mundane (a shadow, a crooked wire, a scribble) evolve into the magical. Quintessential examples of this subtle talent are the pieces titled “Dibujos Sin Papel (Drawings Without Paper).” Alongside the sangfroid, moon-white walls of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, each featured piece bifurcates the distinctions of drawing and sculpture. Lighting and installation collude as instrumental in a perfect presentation of works that live peacefully inside a voluminous, temporary environment. These “Dibujos Sin Papel” share intimate similarities in approach and delicacy when presented under the same roof as the 60s Spanish artist, Antoni Llena. Easily recognized for his sparse use of lines and delicate, almost crestfallen paper sculptures, Llena once outlined all his paper sculptures out of overwhelming anxiety and shoved the actual sculptures into a cardboard box. The erratic, rudimentary pen lines then became the exhibited artwork. Llena describes the episode briefly for the recreation of Petite Galerie of the Alliance Francaise in Lleida, which is currently part of the MACBA Collection:
“It was Autumn 1969. There I was, making my way through the mists of Lleida, carrying a cardboard box with all the sculptures for my exhibition inside it. But I was suddenly invaded by a huge feeling of worthlessness, which I couldn’t throw off, and which seemed to get worse and worse as I made my way to the empty space waiting for me, the tiny exhibition room. When I finally set up all my little paper sculptures looking so unsure there on their wooden pedestals and struggling to stand up for me, I felt I would die of embarrassment. So I took the great leap forward, the one that we shy people always take if we want to survive. I picked up a pencil and drew around the shadows on the wall—the testimony of their absence. Thirty years later on, I realize that the outline of those drawings I made still wears thin for me. But, their flimsiness has become force now, and I feel that all the works I have created since have derived from that moment of insufficiency.”
The Russian constructivist aesthetic in the early 20th century explored the interstitial space of stringent lines and fantastic, architectonic sculpture. In a mimetic approach, Gego unearths organic forms from the most rudimentary and humble materials. Her work and intention still resonates amidst the scattered, 21st century Calatonian artscape. Female contemporary artists are still a rarity in both galleries and museums, particularly in Barcelona. The art world in Northern Spain continues to stir a nostalgic stew of Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Antoni Tapies and Pablo Picasso. The temporary exhibit of Gego’s lifetime achievements at MACBA may be a bellwether for curators to reconsider the oft-overlooked female contingent. At best, MACBA instigates optimistic expectations from both curators and visitors alike. In terms of theoretical discourse, the works from 1958-1988 mark a gradual refinement and accumulation of one idea taken to its outer limits. Jean Baudrillard slices through his theory of seduction by observing, "Saturated by the mode of production, we must return to the path of an aesthetic of disappearance." The scintilla of an austere line allures us in our intent to discover each wall-mounted sculpture. Yet, Gego uncovers interstice between spectator and audience that oftentimes exhibits aluminum wires that can disappear into their weightless, shadowy counterparts. This acumen for relational aesthetics, similar to artists like Carsten Höller or Sol LeWitt, exemplifies the artist’s intuitive ability to attract and sustain an audience’s imagination. If any artist could ever be called the cynosure of art that is simultaneously palpable and diaphonous, it is Gego.
