GUNTHER GERZSO (1915-2000)

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The Visual Poems of Gunther Gerzso

By Alejandro Riera
Translation by Gretchen Van Camp
Hola Hoy, March 19, 2004

The Mexican Fine Arts Center gambled everything last year when they charged an entrance fee for the first time, for the exhibition, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and 20th Century Mexican Modern Art, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection. The action paid fully. Thanks to the exhibition, the institution broke its attendance records, registering more than a 50% increase in visitors.

This weekend, the Mexican Fine Arts Center marks a new landmark in its young history with the opening of Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism & the Art of Gunther Gerzso, the first exhibition of abstract art to pass through its doors. Organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in collaboration with the National Council of Art and Culture and the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico, Risking the Abstract gathered more than 100 paintings and works on paper borrowed from private and public collections. Organized in chronological order, the exhibition permits one to appreciate the artistic growth of Gerzso as the painter experimented with different styles until developing his own style.

"We could have had a smaller exhibition of more important works," said Cesáreo Moreno, Director of Visual Art at the Mexican Fine Arts Center. "But so that the public could really learn about abstract art and about Gunther Gerzso, it is vital that we present the steps that the artist took to reach this level of importance. We hope that when the public reaches the last room of the exhibition, they will have a clear understanding of the man and his methodology."

Formative Period

Gerzso lived all of his life with one foot firmly planted in Mexico and the other in Europe. Born on June 17, 1915 to a Hungarian father and a German mother in Mexico, D.F., Gerzso was sent to Switzerland to live with his uncle, a collector and historian of art when he was 12 year old. During his four years living in Switzerland, the young Gerzso came into contact with abstract European art and the revolutionary architechtonic ideas of Le Corbusier.

His fascination with architecture took him, at age 20, to work as director of set designs on various theatrical productions in Mexico. By the end of 1935, Gerzso was contracted by the Cleveland Play House, one of the most important regional theatres in the United States. In 1941 he returned to Mexico to continue his career as a painter. When he wasn't able to make a living like that, he began to work in the Estudios Churubusco the next year. Between 1942 and 1943 he designed scenery for more than 150 movies. Gerzso traveled through all of Mexico during the 1940s, studying pre-Colombian art in all its manifestations. He also came into contact with European surrealist painters that had established himself in Mexico.

"He understood the surrealist interest in penetrating the world of dreams. This was when he really began to abstract the objects. He borrowed a little bit of cubism, another little bit of surrealism and something indigenous. It was when he began to work with squares that he began to play with geometry," explained Moreno.

Center of the Creation

The square was central in the understanding that the indigenous cultures had with the cosmos, in the architechtonic plan of their cities and the same design of a structure," continued Moreno. "For Gerzso the square is the central point in the composition, your eye penetrates the bottom of the painting and it moves to a side but in the end, it returns the square. Everything else can be chaotic, but the square offers a break from the chaos. There you have this duality between chaos and the movement of order and stability."