Roberto Montero Castro reviews Gego’s exhibition based on his conversation with the artist in the room where her Reticulárea (1969) was installed for a group show at the Galería de Arte Nacional [National Art Gallery] (GAN, 1977). He describes the work’s wire mesh structure, the materials of which it is made, and the arrangement of triangles that give the installation a transparent, poetic quality. Montero Castro refers to the ambiguous nature of the spaces where he and Gego stand during their conversation, describing an experience in which concepts such as forward, back, up, down, in, and out appear to be scattered about the room, and he gathers them up and weaves them into the artist’s life story. He underscores the ethical value of Reticulárea as an expression or a symbol, suggesting that it expresses the artist’s search for freedom after leaving the “tightening net” of Nazi Germany to create a net of her own in her new life. He sees the wire mesh nets as her “adaptation” to the space, circumstances, and opportunities that she found in Venezuela. Montero Castro mentions the significance of her education in Germany, and suggests that her German heritage, as well as her new home in Venezuela, prompted her to create “a new world.” He discusses other works, especially the ones embedded in architecture that Gego created with her partner Gerd Leufert. Montero Castro also quotes Gego reminiscing about the journey that brought her from Germany to her new home in Venezuela.

In 1977 two simultaneous events in Caracas celebrated the work of the German-born Venezuelan artist Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912–1994). One was the first major retrospective of her work, held at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo [Museum of Contemporary Art]; the other was the exhibition of her Reticulárea (1969) at the group show, Arte contemporáneo venezolano [Contemporary Venezuelan Art] at the GAN (Galería de Arte Nacional) [National Art Gallery]. The critic and journalist Roberto Montero Castro (1945–2005), who worked closely with the museum, wrote two important newspaper articles at the time. This is the first of those articles, whose title, “Gego o la provocación para un mundo nuevo” [Gego or the Prompting of a New World] refers to more than just the idea that Gego arrived from Germany to create (for herself) a New World in Venezuela. Its significance goes beyond the biographical context and relates to the viewer’s experience, because Montero Castro describes how the concepts of inside and outside, interior and exterior were transformed as he and Gego chatted. It is of interest to note that although the article was intended to promote Gego’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the text of the essay is based on the conversation she had with Montero Castro in the room where her Reticulárea was exhibited at the GAN, the early home of the Museo de Bellas Artes [Museum of Fine Arts]. This may have been a journalistic device to communicate the idea that the Reticulárea—though not actually present at Gego’s retrospective—was certainly part of her body of work. The critic ends by describing the transcendental nature of his exposure to the work, which leads him to see the ethical value of the Reticulárea: its idea of liberty, which is the essential theme of his article. Montero Castro wrote the other article, “Gego. La línea en tres dimensiones” [Gego: The Line in Three Dimensions] the following week (see doc. no. 1159610). It is different from the first article in that it focused on the subject of Gego’s use of lines, and discussed how she worked with lines at different stages of her career. Montero Castro was one of the first critics to mention the “transparent” quality of Gego’s work.

Translated into English by Paulette Pagani in 2010, excerpts of this review are among the documents chosen for the bilingual book Desenredando la red. La Reticulárea de Gego. Una antología de respuestas críticas / Untangling the Web: Gego’s Reticulárea, An Anthology of Critical Response, María Elena Huizi and Ester Crespin (organizers)—to be published by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Fundación Gego, Caracas.