The first gallery exhibition ever organized in collaboration with Fundación Gego, Autobiography of a Line brings together key works from the artist’s oeuvre, lent from several institutions including Fundación de Museos Nacionales, Venezuela, Colección Mercantil, Venezuela, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. The exhibition reunites Gego’s celebrated Chorros for the first time in New York City since their debut at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1971. This group of towering wire sculptures, created between 1970-71, embodies the palpable sense of entropic geometry and spatial play for which Gego’s œuvre is internationally admired. Also on view are late sculptures from the artist’s series of Dibujos sin papel (Drawings without Paper); small-scale Bichitos (Creatures); and works on paper that complicate and question the relationship between drawing and sculpture such as the Tejeduras (Weavings) and other series created during Gego’s long career.
Autobiography of a Line will be followed in Summer 2016 by a second exhibition devoted to Gego at the gallery’s London space at 22 Old Bond Street in Mayfair. In conjunction with these exhibitions, Dominique Lévy will publish a fully illustrated catalogue examining Gego’s work in a contemporary global context. It features texts by curator Chus Martínez, head of the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, Switzerland and art historian and critic Kaira Cabañas, and previously unpublished archival material. The book also includes “GEGO,” a new poem by writer, visual artist, and composer Anne Tardos, exploring the artist’s poetics of the line and performing a linguistic intervention in her work.
