Join curators Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães and Pablo León de la Barra as they talk about Gego’s hanging wire sculptures from the 1970s.

Transcript
Pablo León de la Barra: In the '70s, when Gego discovers the presence of wire in the wire sculptures, she discovers that sculptures don’t have to be heavy and standing in plinths but that they can be light and hang from the ceiling.

Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães: She’s using now aluminum, and so she’s able to manipulate them with her hands. And she’s basing their geometric structure on the triangle or the square. And so, she’s creating these sculptures that are airy, that are fragile, but that also have this rhythm to them, because they kind of interact with the space as they hang.

Pablo León de la Barra: Now she’s really investigating the shape of things and the structure of things, and creating forms that relate to nature. She wants to understand how things are made, no?

Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães: Mm-hmm. And interesting enough, the titles of the works are of natural forms, and so this is done with her interest, really, in linking form with functionality. And so, a lot of her "Troncos" are cylindrical columns that really kind of echo the shape of a tree trunk. Her "Chorros," which are streams, or waterfalls; her "Esferas," which are spheres.

Pablo León de la Barra: From being something that previously was thought as something that was masculine, that was made of sculpted bodies of rock, of marble, or metal that were occupying a volume in space towards something that’s light and that’s transparent, that’s made of wires, that hangs.

Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães: She’s really coming to terms with pushing the boundaries of what sculpture can really be and, at the same time, applying her ongoing artistic investigation of line, form, and space.

Ver todos los episodios