When Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt arrived in Caracas in June 1939, she had saved her life, but the young architect's plan for life was thwarted by the National Socialists.

Shortly before fleeing to Venezuela, the native of Hamburg was one of the last Jewish enrolled in the Nazi state to be issued with a diploma.

However, the degree from the Technical University of Stuttgart did not enable her to gain a foothold as a master builder in the country whose language she did not initially speak.

But her studies laid the foundation for a different career: Gertrud Goldschmidt became an artist under the name Gego.

With her abstract sculptures, which took on monumental dimensions in urban space, she advanced to become one of the most important representatives of post-war art in South America.

Ursula Scheer

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The Kunstmuseum Stuttgart is now devoting its second monographic show to Gego within a few years - and reveals the early influences of her work in the Swabian metropolis.

The transfer of a bundle of one hundred works from the Fundación Gego as a permanent loan was the reason for the first retrospective exhibition in 2017;

now follows with “Gego.

The architecture of an artist" is a concentrated look at what Gego learned during his studies, creatively redesigned and passed on as a university teacher: the construction out of the line.

For a good two years, the art historian Stefanie Reisinger has been investigating the connection between Gego's architectural training and artistic concepts as part of a research project by the Kunstmuseum and the University of Stuttgart.

The starting point was the reconstruction of the artist's curriculum at the Technical University.

When Gertrud Goldschmidt enrolled in 1932/33, the violent and politically heated discussion about the Weissenhofsiedlung, the best-known modern housing project of the Weimar Republic, was still having an impact at the TH Stuttgart, which had been stylized as the antipode of the Bauhaus.

The student completed a program between traditionalism and modernity.

Her teachers included Heinz Wetzel, Wilhelm Tiedje, Paul Bonatz - her supervisor - and the artist Karl Schmoll von Eisenwerth.

Above all, parallel lines dominate the artist's work: Freed from compulsion as a means to an end in technical drawings, they reconcile surface and space in the form of metal rods in "Murals" that fill the facade, which Gego created in Caracas in 1969, stretching as ropes in a constructivist manner to form a 1967 tower realized there or swing, again as ropes, in organic movement hanging down from the leotard of the dancer Sonia Sanojas, with whom Gego realized a performance in 1978.

"Drawing Without Paper"

Such impressive projects are presented photographically in the thematically structured show, as a video, re-enactment or with the help of virtual reality, developed by students from the University of Stuttgart.

The original exhibits, mainly drawings, but also some metal objects and three artist's books, illustrate the development of Gego's linear practice.

Sketching, planning, projecting, towards sculptural “drawing without paper”.

Watercolours, cityscapes and landscapes from the 1950s are the first, followed by abstract etchings from the 1960s, which at best still allow associations with the architectural: a window, the transition between floor and wall, if possible.

Other works, on the other hand, appear almost fabric-like and already refer to the series of works by the “Tejeduras” from the eighties.

you remember

A line can represent a thread and invite entanglements.

The exhibition also shows this and leads on to the translation into the third dimension: metal objects try out on a small scale what Gego has worked out to fill the space into net-like metal webs, the "Reticuláreas", or installed them as a sculpture in public space based on material science and static knowledge acquired during his studies – and today, unfortunately, is mostly in poor structural condition or lost.

Wherever you look, the architect is visible.

Or, as Gego, who died in Caracas in 1994, said herself: "Even if I got lost to architecture and wasn't able to master life through it, it certainly shaped me to some extent."

"Gego.

The Architecture of an Artist

, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart;

until July 10th.

The catalog costs 35 euros.