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Lot Essay
Considered one of the "Nuevos Tres Grandes," along with Carlos Mérida and Rufino Tamayo, Gerzso pioneered abstraction in postwar Mexico, recasting the indigenismo of the Muralists into a universal reflection on cultural and personal identity. Born to European parents in Mexico City, Gerzso spent his adolescence abroad under the tutelage of his uncle, a noted art collector and connoisseur who introduced him to works by modern masters from Paul Cézanne to Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Following a successful five-year apprenticeship in stage design at the Cleveland Play House, Gerzso returned to Mexico in January 1941, quickly earning plaudits for his work in film scenography during the famed Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Notwithstanding his commercial success, Gerzso began gradually to commit himself to painting, though he kept his early work mostly to himself. "I only know that my true vocation ended up gaining ground day by day," he later recalled. "I began to paint, paint, and paint. Something deeply restrained came pouring out. It was like suddenly opening the floodgates of a reservoir at the point of overflowing."[1]
The trajectory of Gerzso's paintings from the early 1940s shows the growing influence of Surrealism, drawn first from the Magic Realism of Julio Castellanos and Carlos Orozco Romero and soon after from the circle of European Surrealists who escaped to Mexico during the Second World War. By 1944, Gerzso had made the acquaintance of the French poet Benjamin Péret and his wife, the artist Remedios Varo, and he was warmly welcomed into an expatriate group that included Wolfgang Paalen, Leonora Carrington, and Kati Horna. Drawn together by their common European heritage, in which Gerzso shared, the artists congregated in the calle Gabino Barreda, playing the parlor game exquisite corpse and discussing the continued relevance of Surrealist practice. Gerzso's work from 1944 and 1945 ranges widely across Surrealism's expressive modes, channeling its wartime thematics of violence and cataclysm into illusionistic and oneiric landscapes and biomorphic abstractions.
A concatenation of suggestively organic and geometrical parts, El nacimiento de los pájaros is characteristic of Gerzso's practice as he first delved into the Surrealist imaginary. Similar in feeling and composition to the earlier Personaje (1942), El nacimiento de los pájaros contrasts a discordant assemblage of disembodied, preternatural forms against a clouded and ominous landscape. Awash in a sense of foreboding and agitation, the painting describes the cosmic turmoil issuing from an allegorical moment of genesis, imaged viscerally here in bright, primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. "In Personaje and Nacimiento de los pájaros, Gerzso uses visual resources introduced into the Surrealist reservoir of images by Yves Tanguy," art historian Luis-Martín Lozano has remarked, noting in Gerzso's paintings "bio-organisms that unfurl into free and capricious forms, as if they were part of the uncontrollable self-revelation of a universe that is the spontaneous projection of the painter's obsessions in a mysterious atmosphere projected over distant, interminable backgrounds. The scenes are permeated with the existential anxieties of the artist, who expressed his emotions and inner conflicts yet retained a hermetic sense."[2] A rare and haunting example from his brief Surrealist period, El nacimiento de los pájaros gives visual form to both the apprehensions of a war-torn age and the metamorphosis of new life, its pregnant forms already anticipating the poetics of Gerzso's mature abstractions.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park.
1) Gunther Gerzso, quoted in Luis-Martín Lozano, "Gerzso: His Formative and Learning Years," Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2003), 38.
2) Lozano, "Gerzso: His Formative and Learning Years," 47.
The trajectory of Gerzso's paintings from the early 1940s shows the growing influence of Surrealism, drawn first from the Magic Realism of Julio Castellanos and Carlos Orozco Romero and soon after from the circle of European Surrealists who escaped to Mexico during the Second World War. By 1944, Gerzso had made the acquaintance of the French poet Benjamin Péret and his wife, the artist Remedios Varo, and he was warmly welcomed into an expatriate group that included Wolfgang Paalen, Leonora Carrington, and Kati Horna. Drawn together by their common European heritage, in which Gerzso shared, the artists congregated in the calle Gabino Barreda, playing the parlor game exquisite corpse and discussing the continued relevance of Surrealist practice. Gerzso's work from 1944 and 1945 ranges widely across Surrealism's expressive modes, channeling its wartime thematics of violence and cataclysm into illusionistic and oneiric landscapes and biomorphic abstractions.
A concatenation of suggestively organic and geometrical parts, El nacimiento de los pájaros is characteristic of Gerzso's practice as he first delved into the Surrealist imaginary. Similar in feeling and composition to the earlier Personaje (1942), El nacimiento de los pájaros contrasts a discordant assemblage of disembodied, preternatural forms against a clouded and ominous landscape. Awash in a sense of foreboding and agitation, the painting describes the cosmic turmoil issuing from an allegorical moment of genesis, imaged viscerally here in bright, primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. "In Personaje and Nacimiento de los pájaros, Gerzso uses visual resources introduced into the Surrealist reservoir of images by Yves Tanguy," art historian Luis-Martín Lozano has remarked, noting in Gerzso's paintings "bio-organisms that unfurl into free and capricious forms, as if they were part of the uncontrollable self-revelation of a universe that is the spontaneous projection of the painter's obsessions in a mysterious atmosphere projected over distant, interminable backgrounds. The scenes are permeated with the existential anxieties of the artist, who expressed his emotions and inner conflicts yet retained a hermetic sense."[2] A rare and haunting example from his brief Surrealist period, El nacimiento de los pájaros gives visual form to both the apprehensions of a war-torn age and the metamorphosis of new life, its pregnant forms already anticipating the poetics of Gerzso's mature abstractions.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park.
1) Gunther Gerzso, quoted in Luis-Martín Lozano, "Gerzso: His Formative and Learning Years," Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2003), 38.
2) Lozano, "Gerzso: His Formative and Learning Years," 47.