‘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. Among the various creative moments in Gego’s career, her best-known works correspond to a central period spanning from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. These are the Reticuláreas. While her experimentation with the line had begun by working with drawing, she soon tried to materialise these explorations three-dimensionally, with the line structuring all her work.---In pursuit of volume and space, in 1964 she began experimenting with stainless steel wire, a material that allowed her to come up with more spontaneous works with flexible links that eschewed the geometric rigour of her earlier pieces. Thanks to the versatility and lightness of the material, the line was released and expanded into space. In order to avoid welding, Gego devised a system of assembling with metal ties, which she refined with the use of industrial materials. A system of wires twisted at the end allows them to be joined to one another or to several others at the same time, so that different spaces are configured depending on the associations and connections between the various wire nets. This technical resource allowed her to evolve her initial geometries into organic forms and turn her work into intersections, nodes, nets and meshes: a network of centreless nodules, which works by intensity and refers to an idea of ​​space belonging to the twentieth century, as opposed to static and Newtonian physics. The MACBA Collection has a significant set of drawings that explore the parallel line and the ​​grid, showing the evolution towards the Reticuláreas. Some of these line drawings may be identified as sketches for later three-dimensional works. The Collection also has some of the early Reticuláreas, works on paper from 1969 and 1970, and the sculpture Reticulárea cuadrada (1977), a column rising over three-and-a-half metres from a square base. Flexible and suspended in space, it is a dynamic and kinetic work, of extreme transparency. A weightless aerial structure with great austerity of means and reduced to essential lines. Although volumetric, it completely follows the logic of the drawing, as the artist herself tried to make clear. ‘Sculpture: three-dimensional shapes of solid material. NEVER what I do!’, she wrote in a notebook, referring to her sculpture from those years.