After studying architecture in Stuttgart in the early 1930s, Gego left Germany in 1939 to seek asylum with her family in England. Unable to obtain a visa to remain in London, she immigrated to Venezuela, where she worked as an architect and furniture designer in Caracas for more than a decade. She turned to painting, drawing, and printmaking in the early 1950s.
A unique figure among Venezuelan abstractionists of the 1960s and 1970s, Gego inflected geometric abstraction with expressive subjectivity. In addition to sculpture and drawing, she worked consistently in the printmaking medium in the 1960s. In this body of prints, she experimented with many of the forms and concepts that would appear in her sculpture almost a decade later. During her career, she completed some one hundred etchings and lithographs and a handful of illustrated books. Many of these works were created in her studio or at the printmaking workshop TAGA (Taller de Artistas Gráficos Asociados), which she helped found in Caracas with fellow artist Luisa Palacios.
Gego also created prints at a number of important printmaking workshops in the United States, including Iowa State University in 1959 and Pratt Graphic Art Center in New York in 1963. An extended fellowship in 1966 enabled her to make lithographs at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. In this example she adopts a subversively playful approach to a system of otherwise parallel lines.
Publication excerpt from an essay by Harper Montgomery, in Deborah Wye, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004, p. 145.
