Gego

Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt (1 August 1912 – 17 September 1994), known as Gego, was a modern German-Venezuelan visual artist.

Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt, who went by "Gego", was born on 1 August 1912 in Hamburg, Germany into a Jewish family.

She was the sixth of seven children of Eduard Martin Goldschmidt and Elizabeth Hanne Adeline Dehn.

Although she was the niece of the medieval art historian Adolf Goldschmidt, who taught at the University of Berlin, she decided to attend the Technische Hochschule of Stuttgart in 1932, where she was taught by the well-known German architect Paul Bonatz.

Because her family was Jewish, life became very difficult once the Nazis gained power in 1933.

Her German citizenship was nullified in 1935, and she was forced to leave the country.

In 1938, she earned a diploma in both architecture and engineering.

She found work in 1939 in Venezuela as an architect and gained Venezuelan citizenship in 1952.

Her parents and siblings all managed to leave Germany by June 1940 mostly settling in England and California.

Some close relatives chose to stay in Germany unaware they would soon be murdered.

In 1948, Venezuelan president Rómulo Gallegos was overthrown by a military coup.

Gego knew that, after a time of crisis, students become the members of society that are the most influential.

Included in her Sabiduras, a folder of her informal writings discovered upon her death, there is a letter addressed to her colleagues explaining the criteria that would be beneficial to the students of Venezuela.

In it, she explains that only through experience can artists, and architects in particular, learn their medium: Images and theories about architecture would not further their artistic training.

Her views were fueled by her belief that students were taught with too much emphasis on rationality and were becoming "ignorant of imagination."

Arriving in Venezuela during an economic boom, Gego was surrounded by artists enjoying a great deal of success.

Modernism was the artistic fad sweeping through Latin America and artists in Venezuela participated enthusiastically.

Modernism was a political tool as well.

Latin American governments were trying to catch up to the advancements of the United States during the post―World War II era, and Venezuela thought by encouraging the modern art movement, which incorporated ideas of the industry, science, and architecture, the country would be seen as progressive.

Gego made her first sculpture in 1957.

She was aware of the modern movement when she came to Caracas, but she did not want to simply co-opt the ideas of Kinetic Art, Constructivism or Geometric Abstraction.

Instead, Gego wanted to create a style of her own because she was able to use so many aspects of her life in her art—for example, her German heritage.

In the end, she saw that these new projects labeled desarrollista (developmentalist movement) were pleasing the elite and members of government, but she wanted an art that would relate to the local community of Venezuela.

From Kinetic Art, Gego incorporated motion as well as the importance of experimentation and the spectator.

After moving to Caracas, Venezuela, Gego taught at the College of Architecture and City Planning at the Central University of Venezuela between 1958 and 1967.

One of her earliest works, Esfera (Sphere) (1959), consists of welded brass and painted steel of different widths that are placed at different angles to one another in order to create overlapping lines and fields.

When the viewer walks around the sphere, the visual relationship between the lines changes, creating a sense of motion.

Esfera echoes the work done by famous Kinetic artists like Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesus Rafael Soto.

Gego is perhaps best known for her geometric and kinetic sculptures made in the 1960s and 1970s, which she described as "drawings without paper".

It was not until the mid-1960s that Gego departed from the basic concept of Kinetic Art in response to her developing ideas about lines.

For her, a line inhabited its own space, and as such, it was not a component in a larger work but instead it was a work in itself.

Therefore, in her artworks, she did not use line to represent an image; line was the image.

The strength or purpose of a line was enhanced by Gego's use of different materials, like steel, wire, lead, nylon and various metals.

Additionally, between 1964 and 1977, she taught at the Neumann Institute of Design, an institution where many other well-known artists, such as Harry Abend, a fellow European-born artist, also taught.

Gego taught "Bidimensional and Three-Dimensional Form" and "Spatial Solutions" and published two articles between 1971 and 1977.

In 1987, Professor Frithjof Trapp of the University of Hamburg led an investigation called "Exile and Emigration of Hamburg Jews," which he hoped would explain the lives of these Jews.

Gego was one person whom he hoped to investigate.

After several letters to her home, she finally agreed to respond but the letter was never mailed and instead stayed in her collection of notes.

In her testimony, "Reflection on my origins and encounters in life," Gego described how her family identified with German society.

She described, in detail, her education history and her departure from Germany.