Gerzso's,
Southern Queen, oil on canvas, 1963.
Gerzso's,
Opposite Dimension, oil on canvas, 1998.
Günther Gerzso Wendland (June 17, 1915 - April 21, 2000), although relatively unknown outside the art cognoscenti, is viewed by some critics as comparable to Pablo Picasso and Joaquin Torres Garcia. He is "one of the greatest Latin American painters," according to Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican author.
Biography
Born in Mexico City, Gerzso's father, Oscar, was a watchmaker from Budapest, Hungary; his mother, Dore Wendland, a singer and a pianist from Berlin, Germany. His father died just six months after he was born. His mother then married another expatriate, the German owner of a popular jewelry store. He lost his business during the Mexican Revolution, and in 1922 the family moved to Europe.
In 1924 they returned to Mexico. After his mother divorced her second husband, during her subsequent economic uncertainty she decided to send Gunther, then 12, to live with her brother, Hans Wendland, an influential art historian and dealer in Lugano, Switzerland. Wendland sold works by Rembrandt, Cézanne, and Titian, and Gerzso recalls paintings by Bonnard and Delacroix on the walls of his bedroom. Among the important guests of the Wendland's was Nando Tamberlani, an Italian stage set designer who became friends with Gerszo while living on the estate for a summer.
As the impact of the Great Depression hit Europe, Gerzso's uncle sold his estate and art collection. Gerzso returned to live with his mother and sister in Mexico, where he enrolled in a German school. During the next three years Gerzso sketched set designs and wrote plays as he dreamed of a life in the theater. On graduation in 1934, through a family friend he began designing sets for a local theatrical producer.
A year later, he was offered a work-study position at the Cleveland Play House, where he soon became staff set designer. Over the next four years he designed sets for some five dozen productions. A number of those designs are being shown publicly for the first time in the ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries' exhibition, "Gunther Gerzso: Defining Mexican Abstractionism."
While working in the theater, Gerzso began to draw and paint subjects that interested him: attractive young women and other individuals he met and saw in his daily life. These early paintings, many of which are included in this exhibition, clearly reflect his education and exposure to works by artists from Europe, such as Matisse and Picasso, as well as those of Mexico, like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco.
Gerzso's,
Paisaje de Papantla, oil on canvas, 1955.
Urged by his friends to enter an annual juried exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the self-taught painter was so encouraged when two of his works were selected for the show that he began to concentrate on painting. During the 1939-1940 period his paintings began to explore his Mexican roots. Gerzso is known to have spent many days planning out each one of his paintings and designing them according to the Golden Ratio, assuring their compositional beauty.
In 1941, Gerzso and his wife moved to Mexico City. Although he continued to design costumes and sets for the theater and for 250 films, he considered himself a painter. During the 1940s he associated with a Mexican-based group of European Surrealists: Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Benjamin Péret, Alice Rahón, and Wolfgang Paalen, whose influences, along with his anti-war views, were reflected in his paintings during that period.
The ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries' exhibition includes works from each of these periods in the evolution of Gerzso's paintings, including a number of drawings and paintings that refer to his Mexican origin and others in the surrealist style, along with anti-war statements. Eventually, he distilled the essence of Mexico's Pre-Columbian history into the textures and colors of the abstract works that made him one of that nation's most influential artists. Several magnificent examples of the artist's mature abstractions are included in the ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries exhibition.
Along with being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973, in 1978 Gerzso was presented with Mexico's highest artistic honor, its National Award for Arts and Sciences. He later died in Mexico City.
