Mari Carmen Ramírez and the North American curator Edith A. Gibson curated Re-Aligning Vision. Alternative Currents in South American Drawing, the exhibition which was organized by the Archer Huntington Gallery in Austin, Texas. Gibson writes about Gego, the German-born Venezuelan artist, in this essay for the exhibition catalogue, providing biographical details about the artist’s life and work, including her arrival in Venezuela from Germany in 1939, her first exhibitions, and her embrace and subsequent rejection of the geometric movement of the 1950s and 1960s that was represented mainly by Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Gibson analyzes the fundamental aspects of Gego’s work, focusing on her use of line and drawing even as she transitioned to her three-dimensional works. As distinct from her contemporaries, who were influenced by Mondrian, Gego believed in an organic constructivism that was more closely aligned with Paul Klee’s work. Gibson also refers to Venezuelan critics such as Lourdes Blanco and Eliseo Sierra.   

Re-Aligning Vision. Alternative Currents in South American Drawing—the exhibition curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Edith A. Gibson and organized by the Archer Huntington Gallery in Austin, Texas—opened at the Museo del Barrio in New York in 1997, where it was rated one of the main artistic events of the season. The exhibition was curated by Ramírez as a follow-up to Lines of Vision, the earlier project presented in 1977 by Barbara Duncan, to whom the catalogue is dedicated. Gibson, who was Ramírez’s curatorial assistant in those days, is currently a teacher and researcher at Tulane University, New Orleans.    

The very comprehensive catalogue, introduced by the two curators’ essays, also includes an interview with Mrs. Duncan and other essays by the critics and curators Paulo Herkenhoff (from Brazil) and Beverly Adams (from the United States). These are followed by articles about each of the participating artists, written by a number of specialists, such as Fátima Bercht, Linda Briscoe, Edith A. Gibson, Christina M. Harrison, Paulo Herkenhoff, María José Herrera, Carolina Ponce de León, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Marco Rodríguez del Camino, and John Wineland. The essay about the German-born Venezuelan artist Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt 1912–94)—which is the document chosen for review in the ‘Gego’ section of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s ICAA website—was written by Edith Gibson. The exhibition traveled to several Latin American countries, where it met with great success. In Caracas, Venezuela it was presented as Re-alineando la mirada at the Museo de Bellas Artes (May 31–August 2, 1998), where it was coordinated by Rodríguez del Camino. The object, on that occasion, was to reflect the trends in Latin American drawing during the previous decade.   

Edith Gibson’s short essay about Gego is interesting because it explains the connections, and lack of dependence, between Gego’s prints, drawings on paper, and three-dimensional works. Gibson focuses on the lines (in Gego’s drawings) that she projects from the support into the surrounding space, as in the case of her Gran Reticulárea 1969 and, later on, in her astonishing Dibujos sin papel, the elimination of the support, and the importance of shadows on paper.

Regarding the work Reticulárea, see the review published in La Religión in 1969, “Reticulárea: ambiente de Gego inaugura hoy el Museo” [doc. no. 1158935]; the article published in El Nacional in the same year when the piece was originally installed, “Reticulárea: redes metálicas de Gego en un ambiente del museo” [doc. no. 1159960]; the article published in El Diario de Caracas in 1981, “Gego y sus telas de araña” [doc. no. 1148090]; the salon notes from the GAN (Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas), “Gego, Reticulárea: exposición permanente” [doc. no. 1159255]; and the most recent anthology of that pioneering work, titled “Desenredando la red;” see Untangling the Web: Gego’s Reticulárea, an Anthology of Critical Response (The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2013), organized by María Elena Huizi and Ester Crespin; edited by Mari Carmen Ramírez (MFAH) and Melina Kervandjian (ICAA).