Gego: Measuring Infinity

“The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents the first major museum retrospective in New York devoted to the work of Gego, or Gertrud Goldschmidt (b. 1912, Hamburg; d. 1994, Caracas), offering a fully integrated view of the influential German-Venezuelan artist and her distinctive approach to the language of abstraction. On view through September 10, 2023, Gego: Measuring Infinity features nearly 200 artworks from the early 1950s through the early 1990s arranged chronologically and thematically across five levels of the museum’s rotunda. Included are sculptures, drawings, prints, textiles, and artist’s books, alongside photographic images of installations and public artworks, sketches, publications, and letters.

Born into a German Jewish family, Gego first trained as an architect and engineer at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart (now Universität Stuttgart). Fleeing Nazi persecution in 1939, she immigrated to Venezuela, where she settled permanently, embarking on an artistic career in the 1950s that would span more than four decades. In two- and three-dimensional works across a variety of mediums, Gego explored the relationship between line, space, and volume. Her pursuits in the related fields of architecture, design, and education complemented those investigations.” — Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s presentation of Gego: Measuring Infinity is cocurated by Pablo León de la Barra, Curator at Large, Latin America, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York, and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Associate Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York.

Sarah Sze: Timelapse

“The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents a solo exhibition of Sarah Sze (b. 1969, Boston) featuring a series of site-specific installations by the acclaimed New York–based artist. Sarah Sze: Timelapse unravels a trail of discovery through multiple spaces of the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building, from the exterior of the museum to the sixth level of the rotunda and the adjacent tower level gallery. The exhibition explores Sze’s ongoing reflection on how our experience of time and place is continuously reshaped in relationship to the constant stream of objects, images, and information in today’s digitally and materially saturated world.

Visitors and passersby will first encounter Sarah Sze: Timelapse outside the museum where the presentation spills into the public sphere. At street level an uninterrupted flow of images trace the contours of the building’s exterior, while a projection on the rotunda’s circular facade mirrors in real time the cycle of the moon over the course of the exhibition. In Sze’s reimagination, the Guggenheim’s iconic, UNESCO World Heritage architecture becomes a public timekeeper in a reminder that timelines are built through shared experience and memory. In the words of the artist, ‘Like the collective efforts used by humans over centuries to communally mark time, to measure and mark it in physical form—ranging from Jantar Mantar, to the Prime Meridian line, to ubiquitous minarets, clock towers, and animated or astronomical clocks around the world—the museum building will become a site to explore the idea of a public clock, and an experiment in collective timekeeping that all in the city can experience’.”— Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Sarah Sze: Timelapse is organized by Kyung An, Associate Curator, Asian Art, and was initiated and contributed to by Nancy Spector, former Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator.

Images courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.