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Lot Essay
Based on triangular modular units, Esfera No. 3 is structurally related to nets of aluminum that hang from the ceiling modulating space in an unpredictable way. In 1969, the nets that constituted Reticularea were inaugurated in an open-air architectural installation entitled Arrows from 1968. The triangle seemed to provide Gego with a geometric shape that dynamized space due to the presence of diagonals. It also allowed her to generate patterns closely related, in their connection and linkage to each other, to the process of weaving which is how she sometimes referred to the intense labor of creating these works. But if Reticularea broke off from the containment of the object and substituted construction with accumulation and dispersal, Esfera No. 3 returned with a vengeance to the notion of structure and construction that had informed Gegos early work from the Fifties.
This return to the object, however, was performed with a freedom that her early works lack. Experienced in the use of line and space to generate ambiguities and indeterminancies, in 1976 Gego is ready to go back to a more systematic geometry that defied the rigidity of mathematical models from within. It is also in 1976 that she publishes, with her students from the Design Institute in Caracas, Space, Volume, Organization, a pamphlet that details the increasing complexity of volumes according to their organization in space.
Under the aegis of these studies, Gego produces in the mid-seventies a series of spheres and other, more complex volumes, which attest to that huge gap between perception and intellection, between the geometric model and the ethereal object. Despite this embracement of systematized geometry in the work of the seventies, Gego kept deploying the lessons of Reticularea until the end of her life.
In 1977, on the occasion of her large retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, she piled up her spheres on the floor, one on top of the other, one next to the other, as if to undermine their structural qualities in favor of their sensual aspect. Of these playful gestures, of which Gego was so fond, reminds us the chain of little balls running arbitrarily around Esfera No.3
We are grateful to Mónica Amor for her assistance in writing the above essay.
This return to the object, however, was performed with a freedom that her early works lack. Experienced in the use of line and space to generate ambiguities and indeterminancies, in 1976 Gego is ready to go back to a more systematic geometry that defied the rigidity of mathematical models from within. It is also in 1976 that she publishes, with her students from the Design Institute in Caracas, Space, Volume, Organization, a pamphlet that details the increasing complexity of volumes according to their organization in space.
Under the aegis of these studies, Gego produces in the mid-seventies a series of spheres and other, more complex volumes, which attest to that huge gap between perception and intellection, between the geometric model and the ethereal object. Despite this embracement of systematized geometry in the work of the seventies, Gego kept deploying the lessons of Reticularea until the end of her life.
In 1977, on the occasion of her large retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, she piled up her spheres on the floor, one on top of the other, one next to the other, as if to undermine their structural qualities in favor of their sensual aspect. Of these playful gestures, of which Gego was so fond, reminds us the chain of little balls running arbitrarily around Esfera No.3
We are grateful to Mónica Amor for her assistance in writing the above essay.