Join curators Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães and Pablo León de la Barra as they talk about Gego’s exploration of “líneas paralelas” (parallel lines).

Transcript
Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães: I would say in about late 1950s, early 1960s, Gego is moving on from a very traditional way of depicting subjects such as landscape, figuration, architecture. Her investigation into parallel lines, as she called it, it’s essentially rooted in geometry.

Pablo León de la Barra: Basically, the drawings are made through parallel lines, through the repetition of lines, but also her figures are drawn through the breaking of those lines. Her work is about mastering the geometry but also allowing herself to be freed from those constraints of geometry.

Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães: She starts to deal with industrial materials that are available at the time because Venezuela’s undergoing this modernization, right? And so she’s dealing with aluminum, with bronze, with steel.

If we think about one of the earlier sculptures in the show, which is a sphere from 1959, these really heavy tubular lines that she’s creating and interposing and juxtaposing in the spherical structure but at the same time interjecting these planes of lines to create the sort of optical illusion. The space between these linear elements becomes just as important. It’s really this kind of creation of vibrationality that you’re able to kind of absorb as you’re walking past the work or as you’re going around the work.

Pablo León de la Barra: What she really discovers through the parallax effect, through the parallel lines, one above each other, is that when you’re moving around the sculptures or when you’re seeing the drawings, the drawings and the sculptures seem to move. And I think this is a super important aspect of her practice: making metal become alive, making sculptures become alive.

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