BERN.- The German-Venezuelan artist Gego (1912 in Hamburg – 1994 in Caracas) – birth name Gertrud Goldschmidt – was one of the pioneers of modern art in Latin America. She is known for her filigree, net-like drawings, sculptures and installations. From
20 September 2025 until 18 January 2026, in the context of the presentation of works from the collection Kosmos Klee, the Zentrum Paul Klee is holding the artist’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, featuring drawings, watercolours, prints and selected sculptures.

Gertrud Goldschmidt, who as an artist always called herself ‘Gego’, was born in 1912 into a German-Jewish banking family, and first studied engineering and architecture in Stuttgart. She was one of the last Jewish university graduates to receive a degree in Nazi Germany. In 1939 the rapid intensification of anti-Semitic discrimination and violence forced her to flee Germany shortly after graduation. Gego emigrated to Venezuela, where she first began to work as an artist in the 1950s. She won fame particularly with her spatial installations, the Reticuláreas. In recent years, noteworthy museum exhibitions have been devoted to Gego abroad, including one at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2023. The Fokus exhibition in the Zentrum Paul Klee brings together different groups of works by the artist and presents her extraordinary work to a Swiss audience.

Gego’s work is based on drawing and an engagement with space. During her training as an engineer and architect, drawing served primarily as a sketching technique. Under the influence of artists such as Paul Klee, Anni Albers, Josef Albers and Naum Gabo, however, in the 1950s she abandoned the rules of technical and architectural sketches, and discovered drawing as a form of free artistic experiment and invention.

In the spirit of the abstract artistic trends of the 1960s, Gego’s artistic activity developed into a playful engagement with geometry, with structures and networks, space and movement, transparency and perception. Like other important representatives of abstract art in Latin America, such as the Brazilian Lygia Clark, the Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto and Alejandro Otero, Gego pursued the goal of expanding the traditional boundaries of art and giving form to the spirit of new departures and progress of the time. With her work, Gego made a crucial contribution to the development of geometric abstraction and kinetic art in Latin America, which became the dominant artistic trend in the 1960s from Venezuela via Brazil to Uruguay and Argentina.

From the 1950s Gego concentrated on making different groups of works, on each of which she worked for several years. In the 1960s, for example, she made numerous drawings and prints showing lines and network and grid structures, which create the impression of three- dimensional forms. But she became known above all for the sculptural application of her pictorial ideas in the form of space-filling, often walk-through wire installations that she called Reticuláreas [Reticulars]. Gego made her first Reticulárea in June 1969 in the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas (press image 01). With these spatial drawings, Gego challenged the traditional idea of sculpture: rather than creating fixed, static forms, the Reticuláreas are conceived as flexible, modular net structures that penetrate the space and can be experienced from different perspectives.

The drawings, watercolours, prints and small sculptures shown in the Fokus exhibition are both autonomous works and experiments with a view to the large spatial installations that Gego made in various places. They provide an insight into Gego’s artistic working progress, and sketch out her varied engagement with drawing and space, which remains fascinating today.

In collaboration with Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and the Fundación Gego, Caracas.