Verticales, cruz de tubos de cobre

‘With an amazing aptitude for drawing and a subtle and ironic spirit, Gego creates work based on the use of a unique, primary and minimal element: the line.’

PERUGA, Iris: ‘El juego de crear’, in Gego. Desafiando estructuras. Barcelona/Porto: MACBA / Museu Serralves, 2006.

The first creative period in Gego’s career, from the late fifties to the early seventies, is known as the Parallel Lines phase. Gego began to make drawings dominated by parallel line systems with no reference to the real world. This graphic work, however, soon demanded a spatial configuration. This is how the artist came to produce her first sculptures: small objects and some larger ones that explored the formal possibilities around the idea of ​​parallel lines. Originally working with rigid structures, she gradually incorporated more flexible materials and formal solutions, allowing her to make the initial geometric forms more organic.

Representing her most geometric and modular compositions, the MACBA Collection has the work Esfera en hexaedro (Sphere in Hexahedron, 1964), which evolves out of an investigation into the relationships between different basic volumetric forms, particularly the sphere and the cube, without abandoning the idea of ​​parallel lines. Arranged in the shape of a hexahedron, vertical axes support iron rods placed in parallel, as if lines drawn on paper, with the exception of the central space, where a spherical form has been cut or shaped. The effect suggests a grid or transparency, as in her drawings. The work is part of a series developed at that time around the idea of ​​the sphere. In this case, it was the artist herself who was photographed occupying the central spherical space.

The MACBA Collection also has a set of small sculptures made between 1962 and 1970, a mix of both geometric and organic solutions, in which Gego incorporates deformations in structure, size and materials. Setting aside regular forms and using more manipulable materials, she experimented with shapes, textures and colours. Suggesting an insect or mechanical device, the result shows the transgressive and playful spirit of the artist.