Rich Jevons previews Gego’s Line as Object at Leeds’ Henry Moore Institute …
Gego is the pseudonym of Hamburg-born artist Gertrud Goldshmidt who studied architecture in Stuttgart before moving to Venezuela in the 1950s. The current exhibition at Leeds’ Henry Moore Institute traces a 34-year period from 1957’s Vibration in Black to 1991’s Tedejuras.
They are unified by their use of linear patterns to create an object, though Gego rebukes the notion of her work as sculpture, saying: ‘Sculpture, three-dimensional forms of solid material. Never what I do!’
So once more to the brink go HMI redefining the very idea of sculpture. After all they have already pronounced sound and film as within the sculptural realm, so this is hardly stretching a point. Gego utilises the line to create what she calls ‘bichos’ (bugs or vermin) which curator Lisa Le Feuvre reads as ‘living musical scores’.
Yes, it is a relatively abstruse concept but the actual work itself is quite straightforward: taking a line for a walk. Gego conjures up ‘expansive nets’, like intricate webbing or drawn lines that ARE rather than RE-PRESENT space, planes and volumes.
It is ‘the charm of the line itself’, the line as ‘autobiography’ and its ‘autonomy’ that is under scrutiny here. Unlike the Institute’s founder or the kinetic artists that influenced Gego a 3D version of her drawings is never intended although the Tedejuras (‘weavings’ of paper strips) do come closer to this.
No doubt more will be explained and you can make up your own mind at the private view Wed 23rd July 2014 6-8pm, Henry Moore institute, Leeds. Or if you concur with the Wilde-an aphorism that at exhibition openings ‘no one looks at the work, we’re too busy looking at each other’, then the exhibition runs until 19 October 2014.
Accompanied by the beautifully illustrated Gego: Line as Object published by Hatje Cantz with illuminating essays by Eva-Marina Froitzheim, Brigitte Kőlle, Lisa Le Feuvre and Petra Roettig.