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‘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.

From 1976 to the late 1980s, and following her major exhibition in 1977 at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Caracas, Gego felt the need to work with small pieces and so shun the demands of big productions. More introspective and intuitive, at this point in her career she employed discarded materials including wire that she found in the studio to make small murals that she called Drawings without Paper. These are drawings made from wire. They qualify as ‘drawings’ because they are located on a two-dimensional plane and are small in scale, and because they are composed of lines in space with clearly graphic connotations. And they are ‘without paper’ because, being made with wire and other scrap metal, they hang suspended a short distance from the wall, as if floating, with a body and volume, albeit transparent.

In these small sculptural drawings, Gego conveys a sense of humour, fun and great creative freedom. They embody the paradox of transparent sculpture, a stimulus that has always guided her work. The fragility and lightness of the materials allow her to turn transparency into the guiding force of sculpture. Willing to push the boundaries of her own work, the artist reached a high degree of creative freedom. The next step, in the late eighties, was to compose small sculptural volumes called Bichitos.