Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This essay on Gego’s work, Reticulárea (1969) by Gabriela Rangel was published in 2006 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the visual arts program at the Americas Society (New York). This is the institution previously known as the Center for Inter [...]

This is an essay on Gego’s work written by Gabriela Rangel. It emphasizes the international acclaim the artist’s work generated starting in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The recent success is proven by the international [...]

This essay was written by Mari Carmen Ramírez, director of the department of Latin American art at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, on Gego and presented (as a lecture) at the symposium, Questioning the Line: Gego in Context / Cuestionando la Lí [...]

Mari Carmen Ramírez investigates the theme of “transparency” as a basic element of Gego’s drawings. Ramírez asserts that both Gego’s drawings and her constructions are expressed in a perceptibly ambiguous plane. In fact, they result from [...]

The journalist Raquel Chonchol wrote under the pseudonym, “Ray Ponte,” for The Daily Journal, a Venezuelan English language newspaper. She reviewed this exhibition on the occasion of a visit by some high-profile members of The International [...]

Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas analyzes Gego’s work in light of what he considers her contribution to the history of visual art. The critic considers [the source of] that contribution to be the different artistic milieu in which her artistic life [...]

In this essay, Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas discusses the typology of Latin American modern art that is designed “to be penetrated” by the viewer, based on an analysis of major works by three Latin American women artists: Brazilians Lygia Clark and [...]

Under the subtitle “Gego,” José María Parreño devotes this section of his essay “De una diversa fragilidad” [From a Diverse Fragility] to Gego, which he wrote for the exhibition Frágil [Fragile] (Segovia, Spain: Museo de Arte Contemporá [...]

John O’Connor reviews the exhibition Latin America: New Paintings and Sculpture. Juan Downey, Agustín Fernández, Gego, and Gabriel Morera (New York: Art Gallery of the Center for Inter-American Relations, 1969). O’Connor acknowledges the [...]

In this essay, Glenn D. Lowry discusses his reaction when in Venezuela in 2000, he discovered Gego’s work, having only ever seen a few of her sculptures and prints. He claims that he would have liked to meet her, and lists the questions he would [...]

Juan Ledezma compares the aesthetic strategies that Gego used to create shape in space.  Leaning on theories suggested by Jürgen Habermas, who classifies modern forms of reason, Ledezma analyzes the “formative logic” of Gego’s constructions [...]

Hilton Kramer reviews the exhibition Latin America: New Paintings and Sculpture. Juan Downey, Agustín Fernández, Gego, and Gabriel Morera, presented at the Art Gallery of the Center for Inter-American Relations in 1969. Kramer mentions the fact [...]

María Elena Huizi and Josefina Manrique wrote the introduction to the book Sabiduras y otros textos de Gego / Sabiduras and Other Texts by Gego that includes a selection of the artist’s previously unpublished manuscripts. The two [...]

Julieta González ponders the urban and artistic context of Gego’s work. According to the former, the latter’s work could be interpreted as a sort of map of the dissolution of the modernist canon, in both formal and self-referential terms. The [...]

This prose poem is a brief reflection on “space” and “no space” that Gego wrote in English while she was in California in 1966. She starts by considering a wall and its holes from which to let her vision and imagination take off for the [...]

In this essay, curator Ralf Christofori uses the notion of “non-orthogonal abstraction” to compare the work of different artists, among them Gego, a Venezuelan artist of German origin; Dutch artist Lara Schnitger; Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto; [...]

This brief text was published in the first edition of the book Beyond Craft: The Art of Fabric (1973), written by two experts in textile art, weaving technique, and design: American curator Mildred Constantine, and American textile businessman and [...]

In this letter written in English and dated May 7, 1974, Stanton L. Catlin informs Gego that he has been named a professor of art, and director of the galleries at Syracuse University, New York. He states that he will also be collaborating with the [...]

This note within the catalogue to the exhibition, Tamarind: A Renaissance of Lithography (Shasta College Art Department, Reading, California, 1971), indicates Gego’s participation in that event. In addition to some information about Gego’ [...]

In this essay, Venezuelan curator Rina Carvajal asserts that by means of the disintegration and reconfiguration of the form, the visual discourse formulated by Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912–1994), a Venezuelan artist of German origin, opened up [...]

In this essay, Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas finds that the work of Armando Reverón is the source of a “formalist tale,” defined as a theme of “traces and shadows.” It is a theme that Pérez Oramas pursues through the entire period when modern [...]

The United States journalist Julie Kruger interviewed the Venezuelan artist Alirio Palacios in connection with his exhibition of woodcuts at the Galería Polo & Bot (Caracas, 1967). The show presented prints made by the artist during his studies [...]

Javier Téllez wrote this text in 1996 to accompany his installation La extracción de la piedra de la locura [The Extraction of the Stone of Madness] on exhibit at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas. Téllez, like Theodor W. Adorno before him, [...]

The curator Carmen Hernández reviews the installation La extracción de la piedra de la locura (Caracas, Museo de Bellas Artes, 1996) by the Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez. In the introduction to her review, Hernández discusses the artist’s [...]

Published in the first issue of Buzón de Arte/Arte de Buzón (Caracas, January, 1976), in this article, Argentinean artists Edgardo Antonio Vigo and Horacio Zabala analyze the interaction that exists between two traditionally different systems of [...]

In this review of La caja del cachicamo, the action art event Diego Barboza presented at the Parque del Este (Caracas, October 1974), the Venezuelan artist describes its purpose and its components. The goal of the event is that the participants’ [...]

In this article, published in the magazine Buzón de Arte/Arte de Buzón nº 1 (Caracas, January 1976), the Uruguayan artist Clemente Padín describes his work/action project, “El artista está al servicio de la comunidad,” which could be seen at [...]

This is the first issue of Buzón de Arte/Arte de Buzón, the Venezuelan bilingual (Spanish-English) (tabloid) magazine managed and edited by Diego Barboza as a vehicle for mail art. It includes reproductions of works by artists from several [...]

José Ignacio Roca reviews Cimientos [Foundations], a work by Miler Lagos, for the international magazine Art on Paper that focuses exclusively on works on paper. His first observation is that, in Lagos’ work, the materials contradict their [...]

Jaime Franco, who graduated with degrees in Engineering and Computer Science, went to Paris where he gradually started producing sculpture. His study of different types of surfaces later influenced his paintings that included juxtapositions of layers [...]

In her article “2 Contrasting Exhibits Here,” the North American critic Leslie Judd Portner mentions two exhibitions that were held simultaneously at the Pan-American Union in Washington, featuring the works of the Swiss artist Hans Erni (b. 1909 [...]

Five continents and one city: The Tercer Salón Internacional de Pintura [3rd International Painting Salon], held in Mexico City in 2000, was based on the selections made by five curators, each of whom chose three contemporary artists from their [...]

The art critic for the New York Times, Holland Cotter, introduces the artist Beatriz González—who is also an art critic—as an artist who defies the conventions imposed by the North American and European art markets and sets her own rules as [...]

In this article, the British critic Rod Mengham reviews Doris Salcedo’s installation Neither (2004) in terms of the Colombian artist’s career, identifying significant changes in her work since 2002. Up until that point, Salcedo had produced [...]

This is a letter written by the American entrepreneur and patron, David Rockefeller, to David Bronheim, president of the Center for Inter-American Relations, New York, on January 26, 1970. The letter thanked Bronheim for the good time he had on the [...]

This is a personal letter written to the Venezuelan artist originally from Germany, Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912–1994), from her friend, Ruth Weddle. Weddle was an editor who was Gego’s classmate at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in San [...]

In this essay written for the exhibition Jump Cuts: Venezuelan Contemporary Art, Colección Mercantil, held in 2007, Venezuelan critic and curator Jesús Fuenmayor uses the cinematographic notion of “the jump cut” to formulate a vision of [...]

In this 2002 lecture, the American art history professor, Richard Shiff, analyzes specific aspects of Gego’s use of materials and her manual sensibility. As a theoretical basis for the study, Shiff proposes the concepts of “vectors”— [...]

Julieta González reflects on the major trends in contemporary Venezuelan art, suggesting that the dominant movement among them is art derived from a particular context and involving a predetermined space and discourse that expresses local themes. [...]

The German curator, writer, and art historian, Dr. Dietrich Mahlow wrote a study of the spaces created by the [installation] of Reticulárea, created by the Venezuelan visual artist originally from Germany, Gego [Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912–1994]. [...]

In this essay, Mónica Amor analyzes the contribution that the work by Gego, Reticulárea, has made to contemporary art. She claims that Reticulárea is a radical attack on the way architecture defines space, as well as the conventions of sculpture, [...]

This analysis by Catherine de Zegher focuses on Gego’s drawing in space. After an introduction in which she describes earlier works by important artists that engage the notion of drawing in space, as well as those by Gego’s contemporaries, de [...]

[This document is] a letter written in English by the architecture professor Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Stanton L. Catlin, director of the art gallery at the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York, dated January 10, 1970. She writes to say that [...]

This letter written in English by Gego, a Venezuelan artist of German origin, is addressed to Mr. James Harithas, director of the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. Dated July 21, 1972, the letter states that despite her enthusiasm, Gego must [...]

This letter written by Gego in English is addressed to Mrs. Sandra Trop Blumberg, executive director of the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. In it, Gego acknowledges receipt of Blumberg’s letter, dated July 3, and informs her that she [...]

According to English critic and curator Guy Brett, abstract works of art, whether systematic or informal in nature, can be seen as models of the universe. It is on this premise that he studies Gego’s work. Brett maintains that the work of many [...]

Art historian Hanna Feldman takes issue with critics who approach Gego’s art from a nationalist (Venezuelan) perspective, which she believes limits its scope and social importance. Feldman asserts that contemporary experiences of migration, exile, [...]

In this essay, Bruno Bosteels, a Belgian professor of Romance languages and literature, analyzes Gego’s art, focusing particularly on her environmental work, Reticulárea (1969). Bosteels grounds his analysis on the work of scholars from a number [...]

This is the second of the two textbooks published by Elena Izcue, which were designed to teach art based on pre-Hispanic motifs at Peruvian schools. It includes two introductory texts. The first, addressed to teachers, explains how the pedagogical [...]

Ventura García Calderón asserts in this prologue that, in Latin America, the Spanish and Indian races did not mix and that the former ignored the latter even though it was, in his view, “one of the most perfect civilizations in the world.” He [...]