Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The Venezuelan curator and critic Lourdes Blanco analyzes Reticulárea, 1969, the installation created by the German-born Venezuelan artist, Gego. Blanco sees this work as the product of a process of “calculation and spontaneity” that is utterly [...]

[In this text], Miyó Vestrini interviews Mario Abreu, who states that he has captured the exuberance and mysteries of Venezuela in his work. His magical objects represent an encounter with the traditions wherein he found his own existence; they fuse [...]

“Testimonio: El intelectual de izquierda y cierta estética revolucionaria” the editorial published in issue Nº 7 (April–May, 1960) of Revista Sardio (Caracas, 1958–61) analyzes and compares the validity and authenticity of commitment in the [...]

Entitled “Testimonio: Las constantes de nuestra generación,” this text published in Revista Sardio (Caracas, 5–6. January–April, 1959) clarifies the reasons for the magazine’s creation in light of criticism leveled against it. The founding [...]

This “Statement” in the first issue of Revista Sardio presents the reasons for the founding of the publication and lays out its aesthetic, ethical, and political thinking. The magazine rejects an aestheticism that it deems incapable of grasping [...]

Curator Kaira Marie Cabañas argues that work by Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912–1994), a Venezuelan artist of German origin, constitutes a “performative geometry” based on a primordial interest in the act of “making.” The configuration of [...]

The critic Ariel Jiménez interviews José Luis López Reus, the Venezuelan visual artist, who describes his early days as a self-taught artist exploring the field of geometric abstraction. He explains that, for this exhibition, he stopped using flat [...]

The Venezuelan curator Tahía Rivero writes an analysis of the works of José Luis López-Reus, a local visual artist, in the exhibition Vacivus (Caracas, Sala RG, 1993). Rivero points out that the work of this painter is substantiated by [...]

The curator and researcher Carlos Palacios explains that the Venezuelan visual artist Luis Romero’s work is based on an exploration of form via both images and words, and that this has been a constant trait throughout his career. Inspired by the [...]

According to the poet Gabriel Araujo, the Venezuelan visual artist Luis Romero’s works on paper stretch limits and genres, and overrun the borders of literature. Romero associates images with words that complement each other (“the opacity of the [...]

This text, written on a “fan,” carries a message of protest from the visual artist Juan Loyola to the then president of Venezuela, Jaime Lusinchi (1984–89). Loyola expresses the revulsion he feels after the ex-minister Vinicio Carrera managed [...]

The writer describes and analyzes the work of the Venezuelan visual artist shown in the exhibition that bears his name, Juan Iribarren (Sala Mendoza, Caracas, 1994). Based on his study of these paintings, Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas formulates what he [...]

In the view of critic Luis [Enrique] Pérez-Oramas, the authentic practice of painting is an exception in Venezuela today. The painting tradition has not carried on or developed beyond a certain strain of Constructivist or kinetic abstraction. [...]

In Ruth Auerbach’s opinion, the Venezuelan painter Marylee Coll takes fragments of Western tradition and inserts them into an innovative visual system arranged in a pictorial and handcraft environment with a feminine touch. Coll energizes her work [...]

The curator Julieta González assesses the artwork of Mariana Bunimov shown in the exhibition La Señora Lumpuy o la moral del juguete (Caracas: Museo Alejandro Otero, 2000). The curator sees it as the result of the artist’s search for identity, [...]

The Venezuelan graphic designer and draftsman Felipe Márquez created a biographical sketch of Alberto Brandt (1924–70). Márquez narrates some of the key stories that nurtured the myths swirling around this Venezuelan visual artist. He also [...]

This text by artist Alberto Brandt describes the artistic aims of his exhibition Alberto Brandt. Exposición de pinturas held at the Centro Profesional del Este in Caracas in 1957. As opposed to the “pseudo-classicism,” rationality, and formalism [...]

Through his criticism, Perán Erminy defines the work of the Venezuelan visual artist shown in Alberto Brandt: Exposición de pinturas (Centro Profesional del Este, Caracas, 1957). In this text, Erminy postulates that this work is a definitive [...]

In the view of curator Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas, Juan Araujo’s landscapes have the power to express all the significance that painting can. The works in the exhibition Holanda. Juan Araujo (Caracas: Galería D’Museo, 2002) constitute a free [...]

Marta Traba analyzes the special characteristics of Gego’s visual language by studying the public works rendered by the artist in Caracas. In her opinion, Gego’s work is based on an understanding of the structures that underlie nature and how [...]

This text describes the most outstanding characteristics of the works created by Gego during her involvement with the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles, California, in 1966. The article explains that Gego’s line, a predominant element in [...]

Robert Storr analyzes Gego’s work in the formal milieu in which it was created. The curator begins with an introduction in which he provides the essential information about her life, her late training as an artist, and the influence of Paul Klee [...]

Elízabeth Schön describes the works of Gego from a poetic perspective. Regarding the artist’s drawings, Schön emphasizes the spareness of the forms generated by unrestricted freedom, art created for the sole purpose of [...]

In her introduction to the catalog for the exhibition, The Experimental Exercise of Freedom at the MOCA (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999–2000), the curator Alma Ruiz explains that the purpose of the exhibition is to show [...]

Bélgica Rodríguez analyzes the reasons why Gego’s work has achieved significance. To Rodríguez, what is most important about this work may be found in the constant movement of her drawings in space, free from physical and [...]

María Elena Ramos analyzes Gego’s work Reticulárea as a metaphor of nature. As the curator sees it, Reticulárea grows incessantly just as organic forms do, open to the space around it. Like other natural forms, it maintains [...]

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 [...]

Sandra Pinardi describes the qualities of line and drawing in Gego’s work. In the critic’s opinion, by virtue of the multiple directions in which it heads, Gego’s “immaterial line” reveals a dense and plural space. Thus [...]

The artist, curator, and researcher from Costa Rica, Virginia Pérez Ratton, describes the exhibition A contra corriente [Against the Current] that took place at Galería TEOR/éTica in Costa Rica in 2005 and which included works by Lygia Pape , Gego [...]

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 [...]

Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas considers Gego the most important artist in Venezuelan modern art. In his opinion, her work broke through the conventional limits and was situated at the margin of the national art scene as “a work of critical importance [...]

In this essay, Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas describes Gego’s body of work. The curator identifies the artist’s early work in the category of geometric abstraction; however, as she developed, she moved toward an approach that was “organic and [...]

Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas believed that as a foreigner in Venezuela, Gego gave her work the function of an “analytical process” by constructing a “neutral space” in a time saturated by Kinetic art and geometric abstraction. Her work resists [...]

In this essay, Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas analyzes a fragment of modern Latin American art history, presented through the form of “penetrable” works. The critic describes the development of the form with respect to its representation as [...]

The Venezuelan curator and critic, Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas, speaking from a poetic perspective, highlights the relevance of “knots” (nodes) or “knottings” as singular elements in Gego’s visual discourse. The critic sees the knottings in [...]

Hanni Ossott introduces Gego’s exhibition Gego: Dibujos para proyectos [Gego: Drawings for Projects], which includes the artist’s architectural, design, and art projects from 1937 to 1975. The critic suggests that during her training as an [...]

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 [...]

Roberto Montero Castro reviews the inaugural exhibition of Gego’s Reticulárea (1969) at the Museo de Bellas Artes [Museum of Fine Arts] in Caracas. Montero describes this particular work as an important achievement in which science has been [...]

Yasmín Monsalve interviews Gego and discusses the artist’s latest project, the series known as Tejeduras [Weavings]. Monsalve mentions certain facets of Gego’s life—such as her arrival in Venezuela and her architectural- [...]

In this article, Yasmín Monsalve reports on Gego’s presence at the Twenty-third São Paulo Biennial in 1996, and on her exhibition Gego. Dibujos. Dibujos, grabados y tejeduras [Gego Drawings: Drawings, Prints, and Weavings] presented that same [...]

Luis Fernando Lucena reviews Gego’s lithographic works. The Colombian writer describes these works by Gego as atemporal and in a permanent state of activity, with no beginning or end. He also suggests that it is impossible and unnecessary to [...]

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 [...]

Roberto Guevara reviews the work that Gego presented at the exhibition, Gego: Esculturas. 1957–1967 [Gego: Sculpture, 1957–1967] (Caracas: Galería Conkright, 1967). Guevara states that the exhibition is clear and convincing proof of the [...]

The writer Ida Gramcko examines Gego’s Dibujos sin Papel [Drawings without Paper] and reviews them from a poetic perspective. Gramcko claims that, although they are aerial, cosmic works, Gego’s Dibujos sin Papel are metaphors for terrestrial [...]

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 [...]

Andreína Gómez interviews Elízabeth Gunz on the occasion of Gego. Dibujos. Dibujos, grabados y tejeduras [Gego Drawings: Drawings, Prints, and Weavings] the exhibition presented at the Centro Cultural Consolidado (Caracas, 1996 [...]

In this newspaper article, F. Gil Tovar describes Gego’s work as being representative of one of the two types of German art. In the critic’s view, Gego’s work is driven as much by concept as by logic (as opposed to Romanticism, the [...]

In this interview with Gego by Venezuelan journalist A. Feltra, certain aspects of the artist’s life and personality are discussed. Gego says that she does not like to expose her private life to the public, and asserts that her work speaks for [...]