“Autobiography of a Line” at Dominique Lévy is the first solo exhibition in London of the German-born Venezuelan artist Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt, 1912-1994). Organized in collaboration with the Fundación Gego, the exhibition is the second of two celebrating the significant legacy of the relatively little-known artist.“Gego: Autobiography of a Line” is a retrospective of works from Gego’s entire career, including three sculptures from the 1970s that the Gallery says “embody the palpable sense of entropic geometry and spatial play” of Gego’s work. Also on show is a selection of the artist’s ink drawings on paper and examples of her late genre-defying “drawings without paper,” weavings, and watercolors.Born in Hamburg in 1912 to a liberal Jewish banking family, Gego graduated from the University of Stuttgart with a degree in architecture and engineering in 1938. In 1939 she immigrated to Venezuela, where she worked as a graphic designer and ran her own furniture workshop, eventually becoming a citizen of Venezuela in 1952 and living there until her death.Gego emerged in the 1950s, alongside artists such as Alejandro Otero and Jesús Rafael Soto, developing a practice outside of the mainstream and independent of any movements. She adopted the line — both drawn and sculptural — as the central motif in her work as she explored the relationship between form and space, creating works that often blurred the boundaries between sculpture and drawing.“I discovered the charm of the line in and of itself – the line in space as well as the line drawn on a surface, and the nothing between the lines and the sparkling when they cross, when they are interrupted, when they are of different colors or different types,” Gego once explained. “I discovered that sometimes the in-between lines [are] as important as the line by itself.”Gego began her career making watercolors, drawings, prints, and handmade books. In 1956, she started to create three-dimensional works, using simple, often industrial materials such as wire, steel, and nylon. Her career took a significant turn in 1969, when she created her first woven wire “Reticulárea” (a combination of the Spanish words for “net” and “area”) for the Museo de Bellas Artes.To find out more about Gego, her work, and the “Autobiography of a Line” exhibition, which is at Dominique Levy Gallery in London until June 30, BLOUIN ARTINFO spoke with Emilio Steinberger, senior partner of Dominique Lévy gallery and an expert on the work of Gego.Could you explain the significance of the title “Gego: Autobiography of a Line,” and what it conveys about the artist's work?In the beginning of her career, Gego worked mainly in watercolor, drawing, printmaking, and handmade books. Among her early books is a slim volume titled “Autobiografía de una Línea (Autobiography of a Line),” which contains a collection of the artist’s minimal etchings from 1965. The marks in this tome, from which the exhibition at Dominique Lévy takes its name, seem to either converge or branch away from each other depending on the book’s uncertain orientation. In this way, “Autobiografía de una Línea” is a precursor to the concerns that Gego would continue to deal with in her later work.What was the inspiration and motivation behind the development of the pair of exhibitions celebrating the legacy of Gego?Gego is an artist that the gallery has a profound interest in and respect for. A completely original and unique artist, she is part of a small group of artists (mostly women) that escaped Europe just before the war and emigrated to the West. One can think of Gego, along with Eva Hesse and Mira Schendel, who once they settled into their adopted countries developed a unique and completely personal expression, using non-traditional materials and creating their own language.The idea of organizing dual exhibitions, in New York and London, was to show the many aspects of Gego's practice. The New York exhibition centered around an installation of her Chorros – one of the most important works she made, which were first exhibited in New York at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1971 – along with works from her “Dibujo sin papel [drawing without paper]” series, which she began in the late 1970s. For London, the exhibition centers around two important works from her “Reticulárea” series, which is considered her most iconic body of work, along with Dibujo sin papel works and a group of drawings dating from 1958 onwards.One of the highlights of the exhibition is a group of three monumental sculptures made in the 1970s. What is so important about these works, and how do they embody Gego’s unique and intriguing practice?It includes her most monumental and complex work, “Columna (Reticulárea cuadrada)” from 1972, which can be found outside of the room-size installation of “Reticularea” located in the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas. The Reticulareas, which in Spanish is a play on the words "nets" and "areas," are the accumulation of her ideas – lines that are free from being anchored on a piece of paper, or attached to a base. They command space, delineate space, at the same time they envelop a tree diminutional form, but are not solid structures. They define space, but are difficult to define.What does the London edition of “Gego: Autobiography of a Line” aim to convey about Gego’s work and her place in the history and pantheon of modern art?The exhibition in London, combined with the one in New York, aims for one to have a full view of Gego's practice. In her life, she mostly stayed on the edges of a vibrant Venezuelan artistic community. Although she was friendly with most people in the community, and traveled extensively outside the country, she worked in a personal and more quiet way. A real artists' artist.Her work is collected by many international public institutions – such as MoMA, the Tate Modern, the Fine Arts Museum, Houston – but the Gego Foundation, which began in 1994, has never before worked with a gallery until now. Dominique Levy Gallery aims to expose Gego to a wider audience and demonstrate not only her historical importance, but her very contemporary conversation and impact in dealing with materiality and ephemeral concerns.“Gego: Autobiography of a Line” runs through June 30 at Dominique Levy Gallery, London.
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