Baró presents two key figures of Venezuelan art, Gego (1912–1994) and Eugenio Espinoza (b. 1950), in this year’s Survey sector of Art Basel Miami Beach, dedicated to art-historical projects. The booth pairs Gego, a pioneer of twentieth-century abstraction, with Espinoza, her student and longtime friend, who went on to reinvent the modernist grid on his own terms. In doing so, it also sheds light on a less familiar side of Gego: her work as a teacher. It is the first time the two are shown together without other artists: often included in the same group exhibitions, from MoMA's Sur moderno to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Caracas, their works are here placed side by side, in direct dialogue.
Between 1971 and 1977, Gego taught the seminar Spatial Relations at the Instituto de Diseño Neumann in Caracas. Espinoza, then in his early twenties, did everything he could to get into her classes. Recalling her teaching in a video published by the Fundación Gego, he says: "Hers was a deep rigor, but never an unfriendly one. It was like water." Their friendship lasted for years, and the two exchanged works: a 1971 canvas by Espinoza remains in the collection of the Fundación Gego.
Both started from the line and the grid. Gego built her works by hand in steel, aluminum and copper wire, from the Reticulárea, first installed at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1969, to the Dibujos sin papel (Drawings without paper), in which the line leaves the sheet and hangs on the wall. “There is no danger for me to get stuck,” she wrote, “because with each line I draw, hundreds more wait to be drawn.” Espinoza set out to "tropicalize" the grid. In 1972, he filled a room at the Ateneo de Caracas with Impenetrable, a grid of black lines on raw canvas that blocks the visitor's way, now in the collection of Tate.
Their dialogue is recorded in the catalogue of Gego's 1985 exhibition at the Museo de Barquisimeto, for which she chose Espinoza to write the text. Typeset one word per line in narrow columns, it recalls her describing her works as "a very planned abstract work that does not exclude the emotional" and suggests that, of these new drawings, she might say the reverse: “a very emotional abstract work that does not exclude the planned.” He calls the Dibujos sin papel "wires in action": where purely constructive art leaves no room for the unforeseen, he writes, Gego's leaves room for everything.
