Gerd Leufert – Imaginary Spaces
By Ruth Auerbach
I.
Recognized as one of the most distinguished masters of graphic design and as a pioneer in the professionalization of the trade, Gerd Leufert (born in Memel, Germany, now Lithuania, in 1914 and lived in Venezuela from 1951 until his death in 1998) developed an innovative and experimental artistic practice as a painter, sculptor, draughtsman, printmaker, and photographer while at the same time teaching and curating exhibitions. His prolific career marks the inestimable dimension of the integral artist, one that is supported by an abundance of spirit and by the discipline prescribed in the postulates of modernity and the abstraction of forms. His extensive visual production reconciled two apparently opposite extremes of creation: Leufert rigorously assembled the social and communicative function of design with the sensitive nature of artistic expression until he reached, without contradictions, a liberating dialectic of art.
II.
The exhibition, Gerd Leufert: Imaginary Spaces, at Henrique Faria, offers us a new opportunity to revisit this notable legacy, at the same time permitting us to rethink his reach in terms of a global historiography. The vast and diversified body of exhibited works —made, without interruption, in Venezuela from the mid-50s throughout the following five decades—explores the varied stages of his visual activity and advances the investigation and critical analysis of his processes in order to consider and value the singular contributions that articulate his visual poetics. This exhibition proposes an open and interconnected reading of the multidisciplinary experience of Leufert, an artist of a systematic nature whose work, though still not widely known, is about to be revealed in its proper dimension. A better understanding of his work, in relation with the global art context, calls us to investigate the possible correspondences with other contemporary artists or coeval tendencies, and, as a consequence, to attend to this patrimony as the urgent responsibility of those of us who have closely followed his innovative impulse.[1] Like many other intellectuals and artists who had immigrated to Latin America, Leufert introduced rigor and rationality as assimilated principles through a solid formation, united with the emancipated and subjective expression that had inspired his teacher and mentor, the celebrated graphic and book designer, Fritz H. Ehmcke, of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Fine art and applied art coexist and reaffirm tight formal affinities that distinguished Leufert as a visual artist, dedicated to the creation of emblematic forms and graphic signs where constructive logic and boundless fantasy coincide with just precision.
III.
The show opens with a powerful installation of six Nenias in an enlarged format, reproduced in black vinyl from the original lithographs and sketches that are also on display nearby. These essential forms, adapted now in a new space and for a new spectator, recall their first large-scale installation at Caracas’ Museo de Bellas Artes in 1985. In the then newly formed series of Nenias from 1969, Leufert configured these refined and symmetrical totemic structures from the encounter between the notions of art and design. Here he fused together ancestral cosmogonies with contemporary figures, able to transcend the diverse currents of anthropological and indigenist thought. Simultaneously geometric and organic, the Nenias emerge as atemporal and original representations, situated in the cultural space of the collective imaginary.[2]
In addition to this graphic work, Leufert’s pictorial development spanned various inquiries. In his first oil paintings, such as AM (1956) and MBA-4 (1961) which feature an informalist gesture, an awareness of space can be perceived in the subtle orthogonal forms that emerge from the monochrome planes like transparencies and visual textures. In Composición azul (Blue Composition, 1956), a more complex work, Leufert proposes a dense pictorial space from which emerge various planes of light, shade, and color that juxtapose or intercept one another across multiple strata and that, as he covered them with dark lithographic inks, reveal to the viewer a complex construction of abstract forms. Soon after he turned to the paper medium as a means to further develop this exercise in abstraction.
During the 1960s, a decade marked by a spirit of renewal, Leufert realized alongside Gego—renowned artist and his life partner—many studio visits across North America and Europe, resulting in a stimulating and decisive drive that would steer him towards artistic maturity. Multiple influences and a broad system of formal and conceptual references started to fuse within his artistic design: from Malevich’s suprematism to Mondrian’s neoplasticism, the Bauhausian experiences of Josef Albers and Max Bill, to the minimalism and hard-edge geometry of Ad Reinhardt and Ellsworth Kelly—including Rothko’s and Barnett Newman’s color field paintings—as well as the bold configurations and chromatic fields of the Native American artist Leon Polk Smith. In the local context of Caracas, he would maintain close contact with the diverse practices of geometric abstraction, constructivism, and kineticism advanced by a generation of artists that included Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Alejandro Otero, and Mercedes Pardo.
From these years of artistic investigation and travel the series New York Drawings (1963) stands out. It comprises a significant group of graphite drawings in which Leufert formalized a rigorous reflection on the geometry of the circle that he would later develop into large-scale canvases. One such painting, Union Square (1964), is highlighted in the current exhibition for its radial composition and its subtle range of color. Likewise, the exhibition includes two important paintings of acrylic on canvas, Tijoque VII and Tijoque, both from 1965 and presented at the Eighth São Paulo Biennial, which stand as examples of an investigation that announced the expansion of his chromatic range and the ambiguity of a constructive geometry made vulnerable by the emotion and tension produced between movement and calm.
Leufert’s artistic output then advanced towards a group of notable three-dimensional works—which he called Listonados—three of which are included in the current exhibition. In this series, made in the early 1970s, the void is trapped by structures of a singular, playful nature and the pictorial is displaced across these very structures—frames, moldings, and profiles of assembled wood. These hanging assemblages function in order to frame the notion of space and encourage the viewer to perceive the novel surrounding realities in a bi-frontal relationship between object and subject that extends beyond the works themselves. In these pieces—like in many of his drawings—material absence, economy of form, and the reduction of the sign are resources that prevail like an aesthetic consciousness that opposes the horror vacui of pre-modern science.
And lastly, the rigorous reflection and the processes of continual experimentation can be appreciated in the ample repertoire of ink on paper drawings made periodically during the decades of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. In these delicate drawings, the line becomes a protagonist and, maybe, makes subtle affinities with Gego’s sublime creative output. Leufert’s oeuvre offers us a wide universe of strokes and abstract markings, displaced and collapsed geometries that freefall into the void. These shapes and lines remit to us, without a doubt, an urban and architectonic memory in which his singular Imaginary Spaces are brought forth.
Translated by Alexandra Schoolman
[1] In 2007, we organized the exhibition Gerd Leufert: Retrospective Exhibition 1960/1972, Paintings/Listonados at the Fundación Sala Mendoza in Caracas, reuniting for the first time, in a long time, a selection of works that allowed us to explore the enduring strength of his work. In 2014, we made progress in our investigation and configured the exhibition, Constructing the Void: An Approximation of Gerd Leufert’s Listonados, at the Sala TAC, also in Caracas. Later, in 2016, Henrique Faria presented the first individual exhibition of Gerd Leufert’s work in New York, curated by Tahía Rivero.
[2] In 2016, the exhibition Mundo Nenia. Gerd Leufert 1914-2014 (Nenia World. Gerd Leufert 1914-2014) presented eight enlarged Nenias in the gallery Oficina #1 in Caracas, curated by Carmen Alicia Di Pasquale, which further reunited the complete archive of documented Nenias to the present date.