GUNTHER GERZSO (1915-2000)

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Exhibition of Unpublished Work by Gunther Gerzso

Original text by Miguel Angel Ceballos
Translated by Gretchen Van Camp
El Universal, November 13, 2003

Inauguration of the Museum of Modern Art's Retrospective of this "emotional painter" with feet in Europe, United States and Mexico

In 1996, Gunther Gerzso began talks with the scholars at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in order to make a grand exhibition of his work, a project that began to take form in 1999. Gerzso wasn't able to see the conclusion because of his death in April 2000.

Today, the Museum of Modern Art opens a retrospective of Gerzso's work that includes more than 40 unpublished works of he who is considered one of the most important painters of the 20th century.

Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso, exhibits 120 of the best works by this prolific Mexican artist. The exhibition is made up of works on canvas and paper originating from private collections of European, United States and Mexican institutions, they reveal a Gerzso more international than was previously recognized.

Diana du Pont, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, was in charge of forming a team of advisors including Luis Martín Lozano, Jean Franco and Edward Sullivan, to investigate what hasn't been known about this artist, an artist mistakenly classified as an abstract painter.

During the investigation, Luis Martín Lozano discovered that the role of Gerzso as an artist of the post-war period was more important than what was previously believed. "He had landed in the common place of being considered an abstract painter, but it has been revealed that he was an artist whose abstraction has a psychic, emotional and human potential that throughout his career was maintained in silence, he was worried about being recognized as a painter whose biographical aspects were contained in his work. At the end of his life he was preoccupied because his work was misunderstood and only seen as a geometric and beautiful, and little by little it began to be revealed that he was not an abstract painter, but an emotional painter whose painting had to do with reality."

Du Pont emphasizes that it wasn't well known that he was a theatrical designer and the son of European immigrants, but it is worth mentioning that he participated in more than 200 movies during the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, besides creating stage sets for the theatre.

"In an era when public art was highly valued, Gerzso proposed that the internal psyche was a vigorous source of artistic creation and the understanding of the human experience. His work is an axis between the human condition and his abstraction based in nature, the Mexican landscape and pre-Colombian architecture," explains the curator.

The decisions to call it Risking the Abstract, indicates Lozano, is to honor the risk that Gerzso took by opting for a form of expression that was not the artistic path commonly supported. "On this note, Gerzso precedes many of the ideals from la Raptura generation."

As part of the opening of Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso, the Museum of Modern Art has scheduled a round table discussion for today, at noon, in which Diana du Pont, the curator and Mary-Anne Martin, international representative of Gunther Gerzso, will participate. The exhibition will remain open until February 22, 2004.