Three (of 6) embossings on Arches, 1964. 263x263 mm; 10 3/8x10 3/8 inches (sheet, folded), full margins. Signed by the artist and Alfredo Silva Estrada in pencil and numbered 6/17 in ink, lower margin. Printed by Pratt Graphics Center, New York.
Gego (born Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912-1994) created this series in a collaboration with poet Alfredo Silva Estrada (1933-2009). Gego was a leading figure in Venezuelan abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s. She was born in Hamburg and studied engineering at the University of Stuttgart in 1938. Facing increasing Nazi persecution, her family was Jewish and her German citizenship was nullified in 1935, she moved to Venezuela in 1939 and became a citizen in 1952. Gego made her first sculpture in 1957, steeped in the burgeoning Caracas avant-garde art scene, and went on to become a leading practitioner of kinetic sculpture. Her work is interested in space, transparency and structure highlighting the contrast of oppositions such as light and darkness and stasis and dynamism. In the current works, which are three-dimensional relief prints, she collaborated with poet Alfredo Silva Estrada whose poem echoes the themes in Gego's artistic output.
