The Brooklyn Rail

The distinction between craft and art is key to understanding the experimental approaches to weaving in the twentieth century. Artists like Anni Albers, Olga de Amaral, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Lenore Tawney, moved beyond looms, embracing hand-knotting and 3-D forms. This hybrid approach reflected contemporary educational and architectural values of balanced freedom and discipline within a boundary-blurring craft pedagogy that fostered innovation. Mónica Amor’s book Gego: Weaving the Space in Between offers an original and in-depth research on this shift through Gego’s work.

Addressing Gego’s intermedial practice, the author explores the network of cultural, material, and affective connections that shaped her work. In doing so, Amor presents a broader field of exchanges and intersections that are best understood through a relational lens that methodologically can be associated with Gego’s most important work: her Reticulárea [Area of Net] (1969). The latter is an environmental work made of metal nets first exhibited in 1969 at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas. Adopting the artist’s net-like, non-hierarchical approach to making, Amor connects, for example, local archives such as the journals Cruz del Sur and Integral to discourses on modernity and architecture, and these, in turn, to Gego’s anti-sculptural experiments and teaching. The result is a nontraditional monograph in which the artist’s oeuvre is one node in a constellation of expansive relations.

While Gego: Weaving the Space in Between offers a recognizable cultural landscape for Venezuelan readers, the mobilization of so many local archives may limit its appeal to a more international audience. Tellingly, the introduction opens with a statement by Lourdes Blanco, a local curator and friend of the artist, framing Gego as an immigrant who forged original sculpture through the discipline of design. Highlighting the role of women in the arts, Amor implicitly draws a parallel between Blanco and Gego, but she also traces asterisms between Gego and Albers, de Amaral, Tawney, and others.

In the first chapter, titled “Parallax,” Amor studies the architectural and constructive environment that Gego encountered in Venezuela after arriving in 1939 and throughout the 1950s. Using the concept of parallax—the apparent movement of objects due to the observer's shift—she explores the overlaps and divergences between the mobile architecture of visionary Carlos Raúl Villanueva at the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas and the kinetic elements in the works of Jesús Rafael Soto and Gego. This chapter also engages with the institutions, industries, publications, and international relationships that shaped narratives of nation, modernity, progress, and public space. Here, Amor discusses Gego’s architectural and engineering training under German architect Paul Bonatz at the Technical University in Stuttgart. The text opens with a discussion of a technical drawing of a window made by Gego in 1948 and culminates with a discussion of the metallic materiality of Gego’s early work. In turn, the author discusses the discovery of the largest iron deposits in the Guayana region, which led to a period of intense extractivism in Venezuela.

In “Weaving,” the second chapter, Amor addresses post-war Venezuelan material culture and debates on the intersection of mediums, art and craft, pedagogy, as well as the institutional contexts of the fifties and sixties. Among many documents, such as the catalogue of the exhibition Woven Forms (which traveled from NYC to Caracas in 1963) Amor discusses in detail a questionnaire sent to Gego by curators Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen in preparation for a publication titled Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric (1973). Probing Gego’s relationship to the Art Fabric movement for which they were advocating in the US, Gego’s answers revealed her firm grounding in the fine arts but also the intermedial quality of her practice. Well-known for refuting the term sculpture: “Never what I do” she wrote once, here she referred to her work as “lines in space,” and it “[being] only limited by the space provided.” In one sweep she alluded to drawing and architecture as intersecting disciplines that, as with artists such as Sheila Hicks and Françoise Grossen, allowed her to elude sculptural mass, volume, and delineation.

“Weaving” also offers connections between Gego and Bauhaus artists Anni and Josef Albers, whom she met in New York in 1960. Encounters with Olga and Jim Amaral—who exhibited at the Museo de Bellas Artes in 1966 and helped found a weaving local workshop—are discussed. These non-causal and other serendipitous events inform Amor’s analysis of what artist and museum director Miguel Arroyo called an “artisanal attitude.” The latter intersected with Gego’s deep dialogue with workshop production and handwork, which is traced back to her early exposure to German educational reforms, and later to Werkbund philosophy. All of the above, in keeping with Amor’s focus on transnationality and locality parallels Venezuela’s realities and debates on industrialization and artisanal production. 

A third chapter titled “Lines” discusses Gego’s drawings and lines as marks, rather than boundaries, revealing their flexibility and transformative nature as both medium and threshold—a concept relevant to Gego’s most important (and today’s abandoned) public work: Cuerdas (1972). The book’s conclusion, titled “Residues,” proposes an aesthetic-epistemic formulation that validates a residual modernity and the fragmented poetics of the everyday. Through meticulous excavation of the themes and circumstances that informed Gego’s life and work, Amor synthesizes research with insightful analysis, making this a rewarding and illuminating read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the artist, her context, and the cultures of the Global South.