Esfera N° 5 1977

Curator: Gego, or Gertrude Goldschmidt, created "Esfera N° 5" in 1977. The work, suspended in space, consists of intricate webs of lines and joints. Editor: It feels precarious, somehow, this delicate construction. It makes me think about fragility and instability, despite its geometric form. The light must play beautifully on those lines. Curator: It's interesting you say that. Gego fled Nazi Germany for Venezuela, and her experience of displacement and reconstruction infuses her work. She questions the boundaries between sculpture and drawing, order and chaos, freedom and constraint. Editor: Right, the constraints of material—wire, connectors—but also the free play of line. And the labor involved must have been intense, all that careful joining and balancing. There’s a palpable sense of the handmade, a counterpoint to the industrial materials. Curator: Absolutely. We can read it through a feminist lens too. Her choice of typically "feminine" materials and techniques like weaving, subverting the traditional hierarchies of art and craft is critical here. It refuses grand gestures. Editor: By embracing that intricacy, that supposed “feminine” attention to detail, she elevates the everyday labor that’s historically been devalued. What at first appears like a random network actually requires deliberate intervention. Each node seems like a carefully considered connection. Curator: Exactly, she blurs those conventional boundaries. You know, I see it as an intersectional approach decades before the term was popularized, interweaving geometric abstraction with feminist concerns, responding to the sociopolitical currents of her time and place. It really embodies the precarious balancing acts inherent in our own existence. Editor: Thinking about production now, I can’t help but imagine the artist in her studio, the sheer accumulation of time embedded within the finished work. It's fascinating how the sculpture seems to materialize out of pure line and space. Thank you for those thoughts.