With the help of her gallery owner, Rachel Conkright, the German-born Venezuelan artist, Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912–1994) installed Reticulárea (1969) that November; it remained there until January 1970 as part of the exhibition Latin American New Painting and Sculpture. Juan Downey, Agustín Fernández, Gego, and Gabriel Morera at the Center for Inter-American Relations (the New York institution that is now called the Americas Society). Though this exhibition was not widely reviewed in the New York media, it caught the attention and interest of North American collectors, professors, curators, and museum directors, according to this short letter from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (1903–1971) to Stanton Loomis Catlin, director of the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York. The letter is written in response to Catlin’s invitation (dated January 7, 1970) to a private showing of Gego’s Reticulárea addressed to a small group of people who might be interested in this artist’s work, which takes a significant step forward in the field of environmental sculpture.
One must consider the perspective that Professor Sybil Moholy-Nagy, as an architectural historian and wife of the famous Bauhaus artist, László Moholy-Nagy, brings to a discussion on the Reticulárea (1969). She sees it as a “space-art entity” that also serves as a vehicle for the expression of a “new four-dimensional art.”
The letter is written on letterhead, as follows: School of Architecture of the University of Columbia in New York, NY 10027.
Translated into Spanish by María Elena Huizi in 2011, this letter is among the documents chosen for the bilingual book, Desenredando la red. La Reticulárea de Gego. Una antología de respuestas críticas / Untangling the Web: Gego’s Reticulárea, An Anthology of Critical Response, María Elena Huizi and Ester Crespin (organizers)— published by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Fundación Gego, Caracas.