Gego
Lines here and there
January 26, 2023 - March 16, 2023
Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Lines here and there, the gallery's eighth exhibition featuring the work of Gego [Gertrud Goldschmidt] [1912, Germany - 1994, Venezuela], in our upstairs project room. Lines here and there features a selection of works on paper and three-dimensional wire drawings that represent Gego's decades-long exploration of the behaviors and qualities of the line that marks her distinct contribution to the development of post-war abstraction in Latin America. A text written by curator and art historian Mónica Amor accompanies the exhibition.
As Amor writes, "It was the artist’s sustained exploration of line, not as the boundary of form but as mark, that led her to probe its multivalent identity: its capacity to flex, bend, twist, coil, direct, form, deform, alter, map, diagram, construct, and undo fixed relations between figure and ground, inside and outside. In this body of work, it is more accurate to speak of lines as both medium and mediation, since this otherwise discrete element common to the fields of architecture, art, design, and writing is deployed by Gego to weave the space in-between these forms of knowledge. Writ large, line in this oeuvre refuses to settle within the confines of a discipline, technique, or support. Instead, it is topological and relational. Topological because, as with figures that can be deformed without losing their properties, Gego’s line stretches, shrinks, knots, warps, and does many other things that even topology does not allow (it tears, interrupts, stops). However, like one of the most intriguing topological figures, the Möbius strip—which consists of a single strip, one end half-twisted and then attached to the other end so that the result is a one-sided surface with no inside and no outside—Gego’s line slides from paper to space and back again as if producing a continuous virtual plane. This accords with the treatment of the in-between lines not as ground but as active space and as increasingly engaging the edge of the support to suggest the line’s extension outside the limits of the plane."
Gego’s works are represented in several major collections including Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), Caracas, Venezuela and New York City, New York, USA; Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zurich, Switzerland; Fundación Banco Mercantil, Caracas, Venezuela; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas (MACC), Venezuela; Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), Texas, USA; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, New York, USA; New York Public Library (NYPL), New York City, New York, USA; Pratt Graphic Art Center, New York City, New York, USA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, New York, USA; and Taller de Artistas Gráficos Asociados (TAGA), Caracas, Venezuela.