‘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.

Although Gego developed her extensive line experimentation through the language of drawing and volume, her compositions in space with wire nets and meshes brought her closer to the world of weaving and textiles. In the last years of her career, between 1988 and 1991, she produced what she called Tejeduras (Weavings): small paper works constructed with the textile procedure of weft and warp. With these works, the artist returned to her early work with paper, but now not as a support on which to unfold the line, but to be built and manipulated as an object.

Gego recycled her own prints, as well as magazines and commercial leaflets, which she cut into thin strips as if they were recycled paper. In fact, she used everything to hand, including the thin golden strips of cigarette packets. With great compositional skill, she achieved true textiles with paper. Some remind us of her early geometries; others of her work with the line; while still others are constructed as grids or a complex interweaving of grids. Gego even projects faces or some of her Reticulárea on her woven paper, with grid-like structures of lines or strips, in a reference to her earlier work. A lattice of weft and warp made with paper in which, without abandoning her concern for structure and construction, she seems to want to return to a time when she was referring directly to the everyday world.