GEGO [Gertrud Goldschmidt]

MASP, in conjunction with Mexico’s Fundación Jumex, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and the Tate Modern, London, which will also host the exhibition, is organizing a broad retrospective on the work of Gego [Gertrud Goldschmidt] (Hamburg, Germany, 1912 – Caracas, Venezuela, 1994), one of the most important postwar artists in Latin America. Her interdisciplinary artistic production ranges from architecture, design, sculpting, drawing, printing, fabrics, site-specific installations, spatial interventions, public art and pedagogy. Thus, the exhibition will encompass a variety of media, from the mid-1940s the 1940s to the early 1990s in order to include all of the artist’s extensive work.
 
With degrees in engineering and architecture from Technische Hochschule, in Stuttgart, Gego faced Nazi persecution in 1939, leading to her forced emigration to Venezuela, where she became a pioneer of geometric abstraction and kinetic art in the 1950s and 1960s. The artist explored relationships between line, space and volume in a bold and systematic tridimensional arrangement of sculptures and threads. Later, her organic forms, linear structures and modular abstraction began to methodically address notions of transparency, energy, tension, spatial relation and optical movement.

Curatorship: Pablo Léon de La Barra, adjunct curator of latin american art, MASP, Julieta González, artistic director, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, and Tanya Barson, chief curator of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)