Review
Gunther Gerzso
ArtSpace/Virginia Miller
Miami(Coral Gables) Florida
By ELISA TURNER
ARTnews, June, 2004
This handsome survey of early
drawings by Mexican modernist Gunther Gerzso (1915–2000)
brought together some 80 rarely exhibited drawings
made between 1935 and 1941, while the artist was a
set designer at the progressive Cleveland Play House,
in Ohio. Also on view were a few of his brilliantly
colored geometric abstract paintings.
Held for years in the collection of Thomas Ireland,
who befriended Gerzso while working as an actor at
the Cleveland Play House, these drawings, depicting
everything from cotume and set designs to battle scenes,
were little known to scholars until discussed in the
catalogue for "Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism
and the Art of Gunther Gerzso," organized by the
Santa Barbara Museum of Art last year. |
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They revealed the young, European-educated
Gerzso (born in Mexico to German and Hungarian parents)
as an artist torn between Mexican influences and European
Modernism. Indeed, when he showed his paintings in Mexico
City in the 1950s, they were quickly criticized for not
being "Mexican
enough" compared with the politically charged works
of the muralists. His paintings reflect, in particular, the
spare, geometric style of Le Corbusier, one of his favorite
architects, while his drawings reveal his successful experiments
with Surrealism and German Expressionism. Still, a Mexican
presence was clear in drawings such as Causes and Consequences
of War (1935-41), in which a naked man rises victoriously
from a heap of skeletons and scuffling soldiers, rendered
in the tense, muscular style of elder compatriots such as
Jose Clemente Orozco.
Gerzso's rectangular stage sets most accurately prefigure
his later abstractions. Kaiser's Gas (1935-40), a white gouache-and-watercolor
on black paper, shows the artist's interest in the esthetic
possibilities of the hard-edge forms of architecture. A glowing
oil painting, Verde-Azul-Blanco (1978), best exemplified
the evolution of his sophisticated use of geometry. Suffused
with radiant greens and blues, the painting also brought
to mind Mexico's lush landscape.
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