Access a slow-looking exercise related to this work.

Transcript
Marilee Talkington: This work created by Gego around 1987 is titled "Sin título," or "Untitled." A cream-colored and vertically oriented rectangular weaving, created with a mixture of thread and rope, hangs flush to the white wall behind it. This small, unconventional tapestry is approximately six-and-a-half feet square, and about an inch deep. With its traditional weaving methods, the hanging textile takes on a sculptural dimension.

The rope is cream-colored, with thin black dashes punctuating its interlaced structure. The rope texture is smooth and uniform. It evokes imagery of rope used for sailing, elegant but practical. The rope snakes left to right, looping past the edges of the woven cloth and creating a new row below the last, all the way down to the bottom edge. The mix of materials pulls in the sides of the rectangle, the tapestry's edges slightly concave. Along these edges, there are loops created by the rope as it snakes from left to right and down. Periodically the rope is obscured with bars of woven fabric, horizontally oriented at different intervals. From a distance, the woven bars look like strips of redacted writing.

The vertical, or warp, threads of the tapestry are the same cream color as the rope, with a few strands of faint-blue threads appearing sporadically throughout. When the warp threads wrap around the rope, they leave negative space that reveals the wall behind it, creating moments of translucency. In places where the rope abruptly ends and patches of woven fabric emerge, the threads become hectic and messy but still intentional to the craft, like a spider’s web between objects of different heights. The horizontal, or weft, threads are uniformly cream-colored. They tangle and buckle through the uneven striping.

The two materials beautifully respond to one another like a dance. One material gives and receives tension based on the push and pull of its partner.

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