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ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries Exhibition Coincides With Major Museum Retrospective

“Gunther Gerzso: Defining Mexican Abstractionism” at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries coincides with a major museum retrospective presently being exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.

From March 19th through June 27th the retrospective will be exhibited at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago. Called “Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso,” the exhibition was curated by Diana C. du Pont of the Santa Barbara Museum, where it was shown from July 12th to October 19th, 2003.

Accompanying the museum exhibit is a 332-page illustrated catalog, available from the gallery and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. In its foreword, the director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Phillip M.
Johnston, notes that the Gerzso exhibition tracks the artist’s development, “showing how his particular achievements stand as a defining example of modern abstraction.”

The catalog essays include an introduction by du Pont that places Gerzso’s life and art in perspective, explaining that although he was born in Mexico City of expatriate parentage, spent some of his formative years in Switzerland and the first five years of his career in Cleveland, he always considered himself Mexican.

Because he enjoyed a lucrative career as a successful designer of sets for the theater and films, for much of his career Gerzso was not viewed as a serious artist by other Mexican artists. His independent stylistic explorations and friendship with a group of expatriate artists, including Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, exacerbated his sense of alienation from the Mexican art community. The museum catalog contains comprehensive biographical essays by Luis-Martin Lozano and by du Pont that elaborate on these points.

Gerzso’s appreciation for pre-Columbian art and architecture inspired his mature style, which has been termed “architectonic abstraction.” He diagrammed his luminous planes of color as precisely as the Mayans fitted their massive blocks of stone into walls and temples. A trip to Greece inspired a series of works that include geometric sections with textured surfaces.

All the of early works in the exhibition “Gunther Gerzso: Defining Mexican Abstractionism” were done from 1935 to 1941, when the artist was a set designer at the Cleveland Playhouse. One of its resident actors, Thomas Ireland, collected virtually every work that the young Gerzso produced during that period, and those early drawings and paintings comprise the Colonel Thomas R. Ireland Collection, considered the largest archive of early work by any modern master artist.

“This is the first time these early works have ever been exhibited. It’s fascinating to see how Gerzso progressed stylistically as he evolved as an artist,” says Virginia Miller, owner and director of ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries. “These drawings and paintings have been called pivotal to understanding the visual language that Gerzso later created.”

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