Untitled

“It is not just form or volume that interests me,” Gego once reflected. “What interests me is structure, transparency. The microcosm has a big influence; just consider the fact that nowadays scientists can see the tiniest structure inside the atom, the molecule. Because the artist is also interested in what is inside” (“Testimony 8,” in Sabiduras and Other Texts by Gego, ed. M.E. Huizi and J. Manrique, Houston, 2005, p. 196). Trained as an architect and engineer in Germany, Gego renewed her artistic practice in Venezuela beginning in the mid-1950s, moving within the orbit of the postwar avant-garde coalescing around Alejandro Otero and Jesús Soto and their practices of geometric and kinetic abstraction. Adapting the constructivist principles of the Bauhaus and the example of artists such as Joseph Albers and Paul Klee, she embarked on new experiments with line, probing the architectonics of space in between two and three dimensions. Her practice encompassed breakthroughs in sculpture, from cascading series of Troncos and Chorros to modular webs of room-sized Reticuláreas, as well as prolific drawings that probed the (im)materiality of line, texture, and transparency.

The present Untitled belongs to the series of Esferas that Gego began in the mid-1970s—among them Esfera no. 1 (1976; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros) and Tres icosidodecaedros (1977)—that were likely inspired by her work with students at the Instituto de Diseño, Fundación Neumann-INCE, where she taught between 1964 and 1977. “This study aimed at creating stackable forms by analyzing not only the volume of the geometric bodies, but also the spatial relationships between them, and it demonstrated the way in which volumetric forms, even spherical ones, can be stacked to occupy space in a rational manner, thereby eliminating as many gaps as possible,” notes curator Iris Peruga. “Made of wire, these works allow us to look through them to the space beyond. . . . Ideally, their structure reveals that the cosmos can be conceived as an infinite network of relationships, to which we are united by multiple bonds, both physical and mental” (“Gego: The Prodigious Game of Creating,” in Gego: Obra Completa, 1955-1990, exh. cat., Caracas, Museo de Bellas Artes, 2003, pp. 387-88).

A number of Esferas, including the present work, were installed at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas in 1977 on the occasion of Gego’s retrospective. “Made of solid bronze rods and welded, they divert from the more ethereal and tissue-like Esferas which she had been making the year before,” explains curator Mónica Amor. “These more rudimentary works resemble miniature geodesic domes and are not fully closed to facilitate stable positioning on a surface. It is obvious that they were created in 1977 with this exhibition in mind.” In Gego’s floor plan for the exhibition, she referred to this installation of Esferas as “breñales,” loosely translated as low-lying scrubland. “More props than individual sculptures, they must have been produced to advance the environmental ethos that since 1969 permeated much of Gego’s work,” Amor continues. “The works on the floor then, with their allusion to corrupting weeds, growing randomly and disorderly,” bear out “Gego’s continued disdain for idealized conceptions of nature, geometry and sculpture” (“Nature Unbound: Gego’s Chorros and Related Proposals of the Seventies,” in Gego: Defying Structures, exh. cat., Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2006, p. 30).