Gallery Visit; Gego- Drawing as Object, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds Gallery.

In my search for artists who have been exploring the question of space and architecture I had earlier come across the Venezuelan artist called Gego. Her full name was Gertrude Goldschmidt who lived between 1912 and 1994, whose ground-breaking experiments with line and space opened up the possibilities of what sculpture could be.  Originally German born she was trained as an architect before emigrating to Venezuela in 1939.

The exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery was a perfect investigation into the use of line as object for the first project on Drawing in the environment.  A colleague and I travelled to the Henry Moore institute to view some of her works at this extra-ordinary exhibition.

The curator described Gego's work as thinking with the hands. The works on display were bodies in space, three dimensional wire-frame sculpture, causing the viewer to draw on perception in between the lines. In some ways these artefacts and pieces of art question our place in the world. There were no pieces suspended on the wall, they were all suspended in the middle of the rooms with space completely around them. Light was used in a way to describe volume through the wire-frame.

Good quote... "When curating an art exhibition you are not using an object to fill a space, but you are creating a relationship with other objects in space".

Her first sculpture was made in 1957 and entitled vibration in black. I think that this piece was probably my favourite, and whilst her exhibition displayed the work she created through the 1960s 1970s 1980s and 1990s ending with works of interwoven paper, the general theme seemed to contain geometric webs of either drawings of pencil on paper or web is of metal and wire on throughout the gallery. The original piece vibration in black, genuinely seemed to me to be new and inspired. Whilst the later items were geometrical patterns that were no doubt interesting to both mathematicians and contemporary architects and artists, some of the pencil drawings did not move me to engage in thought. Perhaps this was because they were very repetitive and some people could describe as facile.
Nevertheless, the idea of spatial reference through wireframes, did remind me of a piece of work that I had produced during my first year of degree study. I created a wire frame sculpture in order to demonstrate and illustrate the concept of a brain synapse. I must say I felt a little spark of contentment that I had created something that was so similar to this great master artist of the 1950s