Join curators Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães and Pablo León de la Barra as they discuss the public artworks Gego created in Venezuela and the origins of her printmaking practice.

Transcript
Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães: You’re really kind of entering now into this modernist approach of what Venezuelan modern art is going to become. And Gego is right there in that mix, and generating a new approach.

Pablo León de la Barra: She’s always searching for ways in which to continue expressing herself without repeating herself, challenging what sculpture can be, challenging what a drawing can be, and really reinventing the whole language of a sculpture and drawing in the second half of the 20th century.

Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães: In the early 1960s, Gego starts to travel abroad and starts to visit the United States more frequently. What really sparks her artistic investigations into printmaking are the two fellowships that she receives at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, where other artists of major importance have gone, like Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Rufino Tamayo.

She’s able to take this information back to Venezuela and continue her printmaking practice there. So what we see are some samples of those lithographs, of those etchings, of those intaglios, of those artist books that she’s producing at this moment. And it’s really a true moment of experimentation.

Pablo León de la Barra: We must also think not only of it in the arts but also in the architecture, in the construction of the modern city. In the '70s, other architects, other builders, other developers invite Gego to do public commissions, public sculptures, works in public space. So this context allows Gego to explore in a bigger scale the ideas that she’s been experimenting in paper and in sculptures.

This is really the transformational moment of her career, and this is also her major contribution to the languages of art.

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