Gertrud Goldschmidt (known as Gego) emigrated to Caracas from Germany in 1939. Having studied architecture and engineering in Stuttgart, she did not initially pursue art until around 1953. Her earliest drawings show the influence of her training; they explore the effects produced by parallel and intersecting lines on paper and in space. In 1969, she began what she termed her Reticulárea series constructed of interconnected steel wires. The first of these works, Reticulárea ambientación was installed at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Chile as an immersive installation that allowed visitors to, in effect, walk through her drawing in space.

Her major contribution to art is as simple as it is relevant: she took the rationality of geometry into a lyrical world, a world of openness and possibility. The tropical and exuberant landscape of Venezuela surely played a role. She transformed hard industrial materials such as iron or steel, and made them light, ethereal, mobile. She worked with the language of geometry and rationality: pure forms, squares and triangles; platonic solids, pyramids, cubes, spheres.

Gego’s art emerged through her engagement with line, whether drawn in ink on paper or composed of string and metal wires suspended in midair. Fascinated by transparency and the potential of negative space, she attributed her artistic innovations to her discovery of “the charm of line in and of itself — the line in space as well as the line drawn on a surface, and the nothing between the lines and the sparkling when they cross.”