Gego

Malba opens the 2006 season with an exhibition organized by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) with the collaboration of the Fundación Gego, Caracas, Venezuela.

This exhibition takes place in the framework of the agreement Malba signed with The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2005. Gego, Between Transparency and the Invisible will first be exhibited at Malba, then at Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango in Bogota and finally at The Drawing Center, New York. It is a variation on an exhibition held at the MFAH from June, 26 to September, 25, 2005.

It is also the first anthological exhibition of Gego in Argentina. Gego was first presented in Argentina by Malba as part of the exhibition Geo-metrías. Obras de la Colección Cisneros, in 2003, and Malba is also the only museum in the region with work by Gego on permanent display in its collection of 20th Century Latin American art.

The exhibition will include almost 100 works by Gego from public and private collections in the United States and from the Fundación Gego collection, housed at the MFAH. The exhibition will contain pieces created between 1950 and 1980, a crucial stage in Gego’s artistic production; the work ranges from her first series of monotypes to her paperless drawings, weavings and three dimensional constructions from the late ´70s and ´80s. Inks, aquatints, lithographs, monotypes, watercolors and her most famous series of paperless drawings, lines and spheres –all wire constructions that she began to produce in the 60s- will be part of this anthology.

Gego was an artist who used simple materials to recall emotions, to express ideas, and to communicate ideals. On one level, her respect for the qualities of paper, wire, ink, and graphite gives her art the feeling of a handicraft. In the exhibition Gego, Between Transparency and the Invisible, the artist’s ideas about space and light as objects unto themselves are explored in depth suggesting a mysterious and unachievable world.

“This exhibition dedicated to Gego is very important for Malba. This is the first retrospective show dedicated in Argentina to her, one of the most prestigious artists of the second part of 20th Century Latin American art. Besides, it’s an honor pride working in this occasion together with Fundación Gego and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), which have been doing a great job, promoting Latin American art in the US. In this same way, last year we signed an agreement with MFAH in order to exchange exhibitions, coproduce catalogues and develop investigation projects in collaboration”, states Marcelo Pacheco, Chief Curator of Malba – Colección Costantini.

Along with the show, there will be a bilingual Spanish-English catalogue, co-produced by Malba and MFAH. The publication will include 120 color reproductions, essays by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Catherine de Zeghers (Director of the Drawing Center), documentary photographs related to the artist, a biographical-artistic chronology and a bibliographical selection compiled by Josefina Manrique.

Curator: Mari Carmen Ramirez, The Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH)

Pressetext

Gego , Between Transparency and the Invisible
Kurator: Mari Carmen Ramirez