Ruth Vollmer and Gego: Thinking the Line

Miami Art Central, September 21-November 7, 2004

The sculptors Ruth Vollmer and Gego, who emigrated to North and South America in the 1930s, examine the interfaces between two-dimensional graphics and three-dimensional geometric sculpture. Bridging the American avant-garde of the 1960s and European Modernism, they transform modular systems involving sculptures and drawings into open geometrical abstractions that consistently generate new shapes. Gego’s substantial wire sculptures and Ruth Vollmer’s complex, mathematically based sculptures herald a numerical sensitivity that is crucial for the understanding of space in the age of the media.This exhibition presents over 100 works, comprised of sculptures, drawings, and books from the late 1950s to the late 1980s by the artist Gertrude Goldschmidt, known as Gego, [b. 1912, Hamburg – d. 1994, Caracas] and by the artist Ruth Vollmer [b. 1903, Munich – d. 1982, New York]. Although there is no evidence that the two were close friends, or that they had any direct artistic impact on one another, Ruth Vollmer and Gego did share one vital link: New York.

Ruth Vollmer, an artist from Betty Parsons Gallery, was closely associated with Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse. And while Gego lived and worked in Venezuela, it was the New York art scene into which both of these German-born artists fused their continental background, adding fuel to the American interest in alternative models of abstraction.

Playing on the relationship between hollow and solid, transparent and opaque, convex and concave, the works of Vollmer and Gego re-conjugate the three-dimensional vocabulary of geo-metric abstraction. Instead of employing a deductive logic of modernist abstraction, the artists develop a potentially unfinished type of abstract thinking which transforms “content-less art” into an ongoing experiment of “thinking the line”. As such, the interplay of sphere, circle, dot and spiral actively seeks a Cartesian center, a fixed structure. In the case of Vollmer, this search results in a concentration of form, and for Gego, in a dispersal that evokes a lasting sensation of dizziness, the confusion of an empty center. Negotiating the border between mathematical formalism (Vollmer) and expressive minimalism (Gego), each artist introduces a novel field of participation for the spectator.

Ruth Volmer and Gego: Thinking the Line, curated by Nadja Rottner and Peter Weibel, has been presented in 2003- 2004 at Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, Germany; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnolgie, Karlsruhe, Germany; and Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria. For the first time in the United States, Miami Art Central presents Ruth Vollmer and Gego:Thinking the Line, over 100 of Vollmer and Gego’s sculptures and drawings, September 21 - November 7, 2004.

In Miami, Ruth Vollmer and Gego: Thinking the Line was coordinated by Rina Carvajal, MAC’s Executive Director and Chief Curator. Miami Art Central presentation of this exhibition is sponsored by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor, the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners, and the Cowles Charitable Trust.

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