Gunther Gerzso was a Mexican designer, painter and screenwriter, who represented Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism movements. His work was influenced by the architecture of Le Corbusier, the paintings of Paul Klee and the stage design of avant-garde European theater.
Background
Ethnicity:
His father was a Hungarian immigrant, and his mother was German.
Gunther Gerzso was born on June 17, 1915 in Mexico City, Mexico. He was a son of Oscar Gerzso, and Dore Wendland. Gunther's father died a few months after he had been born, and his mother married a German jeweler. The economic crisis during the Mexican Revolution forced the family to flee to Europe in 1922. Two years later, they came back to Mexico. During that time, Gunther's mother wasn't able to provide children with all the necessary things and she decided to send Gunther to Switzerland to live with his uncle Hans Wendland, who was a renowned art dealer. Some time later, in 1931, due to the impact of the Great Depression in Europe, Dr. Wendland sent the boy back to his mother in Mexico City.
Career
Upon Gunther's return to Mexico, he began building sets for a local theater, and started his career as a stage designer, working with legendary film directors, such as Luis Buñuel and John Ford. Since 1935 till the end of the 1930's, Gerzso resided in the Cleveland Play House, where he made more than 50 set designs. During the 1940's and 1950's, he was working on different set designs for Mexican, French and American films.
In 1944, Gunther started to collaborate with a group of surrealist painters, including Benjamin Péret, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and others. In the 1950's, when he began to devote his time exclusively to painting, Gerzso moved toward abstraction. His mature paintings, often referred to as "architectonic abstractions", synthesized the geometric style of architect Le Corbusier with motifs, found in Pre-Columbian art.
During his lifetime, Gerzso held solo exhibitions at several museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Also, his work was exhibited at the Musée Picasso in Antibes, France, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Gerzso also illustrated books by the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican author Octavio Paz, who considered him "one of the great Latin American painters".
Membership
In 1944, Gunther Gerzso joined a group of surrealist painters, taken refuge from the Second World War in Mexico.