Join curators Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães and Pablo León de la Barra as they discuss Gego’s investigations of line, space, and form in her later works.

Transcript
Pablo León de la Barra: In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Gego develops one of her biggest bodies of work, which is the "Dibujos sin papel," the “drawings without paper.”

Geaninne Guimaraes: Here’s Gego working on the series for 12 years, from 1976 to 1988, which is by far one of her longest running series.

Pablo León de la Barra: She challenges what a drawing can be. The drawing doesn’t need the paper anymore, doesn’t need the pencil, doesn’t need the carbon. It doesn’t need the frame. The drawings are now free in space.

Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães: No longer is she using the available industrial elements that she was using from the, you know, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. Here she is really looking into her own archive now and recycling, reusing.

Pablo León de la Barra: She starts to integrate leftovers of electronic equipment, parts that she finds maybe in the trash. They also relate to the appearance of the shantytown, so the favela cities that are made out of found material. There’s a relationship between Gego seeing the changes that are happening in Caracas, a city that she saw being transformed into a modern city but which at that moment cannot house anymore the overgrowing population, which does not have access to everything that modernity had promised. And this starts to appear in Gego’s work: the kind of disenchantment with the promises of the shapes of modernity.

In a later series—which is one of her last series, the "Bichos"—perfect geometry doesn’t exist anymore. No, the "Bichos" are made out of collapsed forms, where the wire becomes shapeless, no? Where the remains of something that could have been now exists as formless structures.

Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães: During the late 1980s to the early 1990s, she’s starting the series that she calls "Tejeduras," or “weavings.” And these are very small-scale works on paper, almost collage-like, that are composed of strips of paper that she interlaces and creates these abstract patterns. If we think about what she was doing in her earlier sculptures, with "Reticulárea," where she is kind of weaving with steel and aluminum and wire—here she’s really kind of taking it back now to very basic form of paper.

When Gego dies in 1994, she leaves behind a wealth of artworks. And so, it really falls onto her children and her family as heirs to preserve her artistic production. Fundacion Gego has been crucial within this endeavor. And the directors of that foundation, Tomas Gunz and Barbara Gunz, who are Gego's children, really opened up their doors to us.

Pablo León de la Barra: In this way, exhibition at the Guggenheim is a celebration of their efforts and of their work. It is also a celebration of Gego’s life, of a woman who challenged adversity but for whom art was a medium or a way into which continue being alive, in which to challenge the norms of her time, no? If you learn to read through the language of abstraction, you also see that the lines are also the lines of a life, no?

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