Gunther Gerszo

(Mexico City, 1915 – 2000)

Author's artworks

20th-21st Century Mexican

It is rather surprising to learn that Gunther Gerzso began his career as a stage designer for plays and films, and also that he had started to paint in a surrealist language, the style he practiced when he joined the roster of Galería de Arte Mexicano in 1950.

His European origins brought him into close contact with the circle of artists that had found refuge in Mexico fleeing Fascism: Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Benjamin Péret, Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959), Alice Rahon (1904-1987) and his compatriots José Horna (1909-1963) and his wife Kati (1912-2000). His father, a Hungarian born in Budapest, had emigrated to Mexico in the closing decade of the nineteenth century; his mother, a Berliner, became widowed soon after and remarried. When Gunther reached adolescence, his mother sent him to Switzerland to further his education with an art dealer uncle, whose mansion, full of antiques and modern paintings, was the only school for the young Gerzso, who never attended an art academy. Following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, Gerzso was forced to return to Mexico.

Travelling through Yucatan, Tabasco and Oaxaca he discovered his country’s pre-Colombian past. This is when he abandoned Surrealism and shifted his interest, more in aesthetic than in archaeological terms, towards a nonliteral syntax of abstraction. A trip to Greece in 1954 inspired a series of twenty or thirty paintings conveying the light of its arid landscape, intense heat and the white dry stone atmosphere. Gerzso had learned his trade imitating the dexterity of old European masters, with glazes, polished textures and a painstaking superposition of thin layers of pigments on the surface of the support. “Deep down, I continue doing what I was taught when I was twelve,” he claimed. A lone wolf, Gerzso was an important painter and a reference for many other artists.