In this essay about Gego for the group exhibition, ERRE. Variations Labyrinthiques [ERRE: Labyrinthine Variations], presented at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the French curators Hélène Guenin and Magali Le Mens include biographical details, such as when she arrived in Venezuela (1939), and her place among the most important Venezuelan artists in the late 1950s, Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Díez. The essay pays particular attention to the differences between them, because both curators understood that Gego was working in a field of her own, and was not part of the Venezuelan Kinetic art movement. In their opinion, Gego’s work was unique because of its quest for the essential, both in its analytical context and in its fragility, and they report on the changes there have been in her artistic vocabulary, her career, her triangle-based systems, her materials, and the organic elements that distinguish her work. They explain that her most significant achievement was the Reticulárea—presented at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, in 1969—and briefly review this greatest example of Gego’s work. They support their opinions by citing the views of Venezuelan critics, such as Lourdes Blanco and Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas. They close with a brief description of Gego’s Dibujos sin papel [Drawings without Paper] and an itemization of the qualities they detect in this series.

This brief essay by Hélène Guenin and Magali Le Mens on the subject of the German-born Venezuelan artist, Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt 1912–1994), for the group exhibition ERRE. Variations Labyrintiques [ERRE: Labyrinthine Variations], presented at the Centre Pompidou-Metz (September 12, 2011 to March 5, 2012), appears in chapter six of the catalogue for the exhibition, which included artists such as Nicolas Moulin and Robert Morris. The exhibition also included works by international artists working in the fields of modern and contemporary art: Alexander Rodchenko and Kazimir Malevich (Russia), Frank Stella (North America), and Hélio Oiticica (Brazil). It is interesting to note that, though this is the most recent article about Gego’s work (published in 2011), it nonetheless refers back to very early critical opinions of her Reticulárea. Forty years hence, these opinions are now reaching new audiences in a very different cultural, temporal, and geographical context, and on a broader and more international stage. Among other things, the authors refer to the image of the spider’s web, first suggested by Lourdes Blanco in 1969 and then mentioned time and again over the years by the press, the critics, and art history. They also refer to the ubiquitous thesis on Gego written by the Argentine critic Marta Traba, which was thoroughly analyzed by Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas in several of his essays. According to that reading, Gego was working “separately from the Venezuelan Kinetic movement that was actively embracing the modernist trend in the latter part of the 1950s.”