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In collaboration with Fundación Gego and building upon Brett Gorvy and Dominique Lévy’s longstanding relationship with the artist’s estate, LGDR presents “Lines in Space,” an exhibition of works by Gego (1912-1994), marking the first ground-floor solo presentation of the gallery’s flagship at 19 East 64th Street. “Lines in Space” offers a concentrated survey of Gego’s works, placing rare and historically significant sculptures in compelling dialogue with works on paper that provide foundational context for Gego’s radical approach to line and space across all media.
Gego, posthumously considered a leading figure of Venezuelan abstraction of the 1960s and ’70s, vehemently rejected formal categorization during her lifetime, but derived influence from peer movements including Kinetic Art, Op Art, Constructivism, and Geometric Abstraction, combined with aspects of her German heritage such as Bauhaus and the technical craft of weaving that she learned during childhood in Hamburg.
When Gego’s family fled Nazi Germany to England, Gego stayed behind in Stuttgart to finish her degree in architecture and engineering. By the time she was ready to join her family in England in 1939, it had become much harder for Jews to leave; unable to obtain papers for England, she liquidated the belongings of her family home and seized an opportunity for an employment visa in Venezuela – where the Germanic “Gertrud Goldschmidt” morphed into the diminutive “Gego.”
Best known for her net-like wire structures, Gego’s approach to geometric abstraction melds her calligraphic hand with her technical training in architecture and engineering. Working between disciplines and embracing the intuitive nature of expressionism, Gego challenged the grid as an idealized form and sought to subvert the boundaries of rational structure.
Spanning a period from 1955 through 1990, “Lines in Space” begins with an early watercolor landscape followed by works on paper that explore the possibilities of line to disrupt or diffuse ordered composition. Among many exhibition highlights are the six-part steel-and-bronze sculpture Cornisa I (1967); the constellated wire structure Chorro (1979/86); and the rectilinear “drawing without paper” Meccano Dibujo sin papel (1985).
The most recent works on view belong to the artist’s final series, “Tejeduras (Weavings)” (1988–91), which comprise found paper woven to recall the textile craft Gego learned in her childhood in Hamburg.
“In Gego’s work, I find everything and its opposite,” Dominique Lévy said. Lévy is a Partner at LGDR who has worked intimately with Fundación Gego to advocate the artist’s work across numerous projects over the years (alongside Emilio Steinberger, Senior Partner at LGDR, who spearheaded the conceptualization of Lines in Space). “Fullness and void, muscularity and delicacy, stillness and movement, volume, and emptiness. A voracious, free, and courageous artist, what Gego felt to be urgent and essential could not be accomplished by engaging with any one established medium or ideology.”
About the Exhibition
Chorro (1979/86), one of the exhibition’s centerpieces is a notable example of Gego’s sculptural oeuvre. Initiated in 1979 as part of her “Chorros (Streams)” series—a body of work that had its New York debut at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1971—the artist reworked the piece in 1986, imbuing it with the net-like qualities of her later Reticulàrea series. This rare work is one of approximately 15 large-scale freestanding wire sculptures by the artist.
Another artwork, 4 módulos (1973), straddles the mediums of drawing and sculpture by using metal elements to build on the avantgarde tradition of drawing in space. Both artworks offer a remarkable conceptual embodiment of Gego’s overall dissolution of structural boundaries to activate marginal space in new and unexpected ways.
“Lines in Space” follows Gego exhibitions organized by Lévy Gorvy in New York (2015) and London (2016), continuing a longstanding relationship with the artist’s estate. In 2015 and with a second printing in 2019, Dominique Lévy published the comprehensive monograph, “Gego: Autobiography of a Line,” featuring leading academic perspectives of Gego’s life and work.
The retrospective “Gego: Measuring Infinity,” currently on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through September, traveled from Museo Jumex in Mexico City (October 2022 – February 2023) and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (December 2019 – March 2020), and will continue on to the Guggenheim Bilbao (October 2023 – February 2024)
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born Gertrud Goldschmidt in Hamburg, Germany, Gego studied engineering and architecture at the Technical School of Stuttgart (1938). In 1939, she fled Nazi Germany and immigrated to Caracas, Venezuela. A contemporary of Kinetic artists Jesús Rafael Soto and Alejandro Otero, she arrived at her art practice when she was 41. Traveling exhibitions and retrospectives dedicated to the artist have been organized by such institutions as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Museo Jumex, MexicoCity (2022–23); Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas (2000); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2005); Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto (2006); Hamburger Kunsthalle (2013); the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2014); and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2022). In 2005, Gego’s writings (Sabiduras) were published for the first time.
ABOUT LGDR
Founded by Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, Amalia Dayan, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, LGDR is a collaborative international art venture that brings expertise and vision to its disciplines. LGDR represents and partners with artists and estates—realizing seminal projects and furthering legacies.
From placing primary and secondary works of the highest quality and advising clients on the development of their collections, to harnessing its institutional relationships and presenting a curated program with scholarly publications, LGDR puts artistic voices first.
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