Join curators Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães and Pablo León de la Barra as they discuss the origins of Gego’s artistic practice.

Transcript
Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães: Gego, her story is quite important to understand. We know that she was born in Hamburg, that she had to escape Nazi Germany and really become a refugee, a displaced person in Venezuela, and coming at the age close to thirty, really starting anew. She came from a very affluent Jewish family. With her degree in architecture and engineering, she comes to Venezuela already a professional.

Pablo León de la Barra: She didn’t know the language at the beginning. She has to deal with becoming bilingual, and drawing and the line becomes a way of communicating, no? Gego allows her hand to do watercolors to draw the people of the village, the houses, the views, the landscape.

And these first bodies of work show this transition from figuration to her first explorations into abstraction, also her learning to master some of the tools which will become part of her practice: etching, printing, the transmission and repetition of lines in papers, no?

Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães: She opens herself up to this new chapter in her life, really immersing herself in this artistic practice that would occupy the next four decades of her life.

Pablo León de la Barra: This is the moment where she takes her childhood nickname, Gego—Gertrud Goldschmidt—and adopts it as her artistic name. So, Gertrud Goldschmidt, the woman, becomes Gego, the artist.

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