Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The curator María Elena Ramos provides a broad overview of Alejandro Otero’s oeuvre on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of his work. Ramos reflects on the Venezuelan painter and sculptor’s essential concerns which, in her opinion, wove [...]

The curator and cultural promotor Tahía Rivero launches into her essay on the work of Pedro Tagliafico with a quote from Aristotle about agora [space]. After outlining this Venezuelan mixed media painter and artist’s career and his commitment to [...]

Curator María Elena Ramos reflects on the problem of “space” on the basis of works by Víctor Lucena in which space is manipulated in objects, geometric shapes, materials, colors, and textures. Ramos underscores the importance of perception ( [...]

The curator María Elena Ramos discusses the problem of space, both in architecture and in works of art that involve manipulating art and space; her frame of reference ranges from what is “visible and exists” (architecture, real space) to what is [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, 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 [...]

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; [...]

In this review, Josefina Núñez refers to Gego’s training and development as a graphic artist, and discusses her technical and creative approach to printing and lithography. Núñez takes a long look at Gego’s art based on her unique use of line [...]

In this article, Venezuelan critic and professor Mónica Amor refutes the constructivist and organicist approach that has been used to understand Gego’s work. That approach, she claims, does not address the way Gego’s production undermines [ [...]

Eliseo Sierra analyzes the sources and characteristics of Gego’s graphic discourse (drawings, prints, watercolors, and weavings). Sierra finds that the artist’s work resists classification and is substantially different from the masterworks of [...]

Journalist Rubén Wisotzki interviewed Magdalena Fernández in 1996, when she was awarded the Premio Eugenio Mendoza. Fernández acknowledges that her work, particularly her studies in design to which abstraction and geometricism are fundamental, is [...]

Lorena González sees similarities between works by Gego and those by the Venezuelan writer Antonia Palacios, in that they are both based on a noticeable sense of temporality. According to González, “the line”—the fundamental element in Gego [...]

In this essay, Roberto Guevara gives an overview of Gego’s career, [based on a selection of works that are] on display at the São Paulo Biennial. Guevara describes how Gego’s work has evolved from her early sculptures in the 1950s to her latest [...]

With this text, Mariela Avellaneda de Luna officially presents Gego at the twenty-third São Paulo Biennial. Avellaneda points out the importance of the line in Gego’s large structures, such as the versions of Reticulárea, emphasizing the way the [...]

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 [...]

In this text, literary critic Flora Süssekind discusses the work of sculptor Ângelo Venosa from the time of his first solo show (1985) to his recent productions (1990). She points out the recurrence in his art of carcasses, vertebrae, teeth, skulls [...]

In this handwritten text found in one of Carlos Rojas’s notebooks, the artist explains some of the ideas surrounding his work, specifically in relation to two major questions: his perception of the laws of nature, which he understands in terms of [...]

The North American professor Donald Kuspit discusses the work of Jacobo Borges in terms of its creation of “potential spaces,” referring to the concept used in the jargon of psychoanalysis. In a potential space—defined as an area midway between [...]

This interview by Aurora Blyde with Venezuelan artist Sigfredo Chacón took place in the framework of the exhibition CCS-10. Arte venezolano actual held at the Fundación Galería de Arte Nacional in Caracas in 1993. The topics addressed include the [...]

The German-born Venezuelan artist Gego briefly explains some of her thoughts on the meaning and use of the line. In her view the human idea of “a line” is abstract, since it does not exist in nature. But as a medium it can express descriptive [...]

In this speech to her companions at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Gego describes the basic tenets of her work and outlines the projects she plans to present. She explains how her use of line has evolved over the course of time, from her early [...]

Critic Mariana Figarella analyzes the series of Dibujos sin papel [Drawings Without Paper] that Gego, a Venezuelan artist of German origin, produced between 1976 and 1984. Figarella discusses the “ambiguity” of these works and the subsequent [...]

In this essay, Ruth Auerbach discusses Bichos [Creatures]—the three-dimensional works by Venezuelan artist Gego—within the overall context of her production. After providing an overview of Gego’s art, Auerbach states that these works are [...]

The conceptual artist Lea Lublin writes that her work analyzes the problem of the image stemming from its inscription in space, which is considered as a continuous medium of transformations. For her, the artwork is an image index (which is off- [...]

In this document, Gregorio Vardanega discusses the importance of space in his work. He tried to address this question in a variety of ways, such as his plaster hemispheres, called complejos espaciales [spatial complexes] and his spiraling dots in [...]

This article discusses the various ways in which the question of space has been addressed in sculpture, architecture, and painting over the course of time, and reflects simultaneously on how space is portrayed in abstract and concrete painting [...]

The article shows a certain displacement in Tomás Maldonado’s axis of interest, since it defines architecture as a protagonist, not only of the formal aspect but of the social aspect as well [...]