homage to gego

Spiral. Homage to Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt). 2011

Installation & Vj session

Canvas, drinking straws and metal

Variable measures

A veil spirals inward towards the room’s center. This form, its materiality and construction, references Fibonacci (1170–1250), Wentzel Jamnitzer (1508–1585), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), and Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983). Draping over this anatomical shape is a geometric configuration made out of drinking straws,representing Castañeda’s re-reading of Gego’s Reticulárea, which was originally commissioned for this same gallery (Americas Society) in 1969.

Appropriation is a strategy Castañeda uses frequently. For this project, she decided to cite this particular installation, originally made out of aluminum and steel. Gego experimented with de-centering forms in the context of kinetic art and spatial practices. Castañeda identifies this critical moment in post-war art making as especially relevant, and restages Gego’s structure in an attempt to continue this line of inquiry by repositioning the Reticulárea as a central figure in the modernist canon. Furthermore, Castañeda aims to evoke a complexity of issues embedded in the field of genetic research, focusing on the research of Crick & Watson (1953) and subsequent

developments made in the breakdown and study of DNA.

About GEGO’s Center for Inter-American Relations Reticulárea Gertrude Goldschmidt (Hamburg 1912–Caracas 1994), known as Gego, was an artist originally trained as an architect. Gego installed a site-specific environment Reticulárea at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1969, with a second version of the piece shown later that year at the Conkright Gallery in Caracas. Stanton Loomis Catlin, then Director of Visual Arts at the Center for Inter-American Relations (now Americas Society), brought the piece to the United States, inviting Gego to construct a new version for the group exhibition Latin America: New Paintings and Sculptures, Juan Downey, Agustin Fernandez, Gego and Gabriel Morera, on view from November 20, 1969 to January 18, 1970. This version was the only Reticulárea created outside Venezuela, and incorporated two radically new elements: the use of color wires, and a white fabric that wrapped the architecture of the gallery. This Reticulárea was a hybrid of astonishingly laborious work composed of numerous nettings and wire meshes of stainless steel, iron, and aluminum of varying sizes.1 Critic Lourdes Blanco considers the Reticulárea as “an outgrowth of drawing, to which Gego returned after each foray in three dimensions (…) its process of construction is similar to that of drawing, without the limitations of paper.” For Blanco, the Reticulárea “evokes the living, whether by a cellular or molecular suggestion. It works on the viewer, eliciting their attention. Visually, it defines the space as indefinite,

flowing unlimitedly. It is both friendly and forbidding, relating to manmade structures and to the structures of nature and the universe.”2

1 For further information see Gabriela Rangel, Reticulárea: Module and Version. In G. Rangel, A Principality of its Own (Americas Society-David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, New York-Cambridge, MA. 2007) p.198–211

2 Lourdes Blanco. In: Latin America: New Paintings and Sculpture, Juan Downey, Agustin Fernández, Gego and Gabriel Morera. Art Gallery Center for Inter-American Relations. 1969. n.p

Texts used at the exhibition For Rent: Consuelo Castañeda. Curated by Yasmeen Siddiqui in collaboration with Gabriela Rangel. May 17–July 30, 2011. America s Society

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