Watching
talent rise to the top
By ELISA TURNER
The Miami Herald
, Sunday, April 04, 2004
A stand-out show at Art/Space Virginia Miller
Galleries looks at the early work of Mexican master Gunther
Gerzso...
At Art/SpaceVirginia Miller, Gunther Gerzso: Defining Mexican
Abstractionism offers a glance in the past at a young artist
trying his hand at a host of sophisticated styles, knowing
all the while he'll finally choose, and succeed at, something
that's a bold breakthrough. Coral Gables art dealer Virginia
Miller is presenting a rarely seen collection of some 80
early drawings, along with a few later paintings, by the
cosmopolitan Mexican artist Gunther Gerzso (1915-2000). He
was well-traveled, astute in the ways of modern European
art and architecture, but not so well understood, especially
by his countrymen.
He made these drawings in his early 20s while learning his
trade as set designer at the progressive Cleveland Playhouse
in Ohio, from 1935 to 1940. This was an experience he quickly
parlayed into a successful career designing sets for the
Mexican cinema, replacing a fussily detailed look in Mexican
film, a holdover from Spanish theater, with a spare elegance
learned from the European avant-garde.
The drawings are a sophisticated suite of costume designs,
cooly geometric designs for stage sets and personal works
that ricochet confidently through the styles of Matisse,
various surrealists and the Mexican muralists. They were
produced about a decade before Gerzso settled into painting
his signature canvases. His mature works are faceted with
gem-like architectural spaces, reminiscent of the shifting
rectangular sets he designed in Cleveland.
In this standout gallery show, you can imagine one of those
sets by looking at his white gouache and watercolor on black
paper in the drawing Kaiser's Gas, a design for playwright
Georg Kaiser's trilogy Gas. On the other hand, the tensely
muscular drawing Causes and Consequences of War could be
a Mexican muralist's vignette.
In a painting like Verde-Azul-Blanco (1978), also at Virginia
Miller, Gerzso mapped out glowing rectangles and overlapping
planes of color. He brilliantly wedded the look of densely
packed reliefs found in Mayan ruins with the formal distillations
of European and American Modernism. His paintings reveled
in emerald greens and royal blues, colors that reminded him
of Mexico's rainforests.
The price Gerzso paid for being a
pioneering abstractionist in a country enthralled with
its politically aware muralists, such as Diego Rivera and
José Clemente Orozco, was
sneering neglect.
In the 1950s, Gerzso's critics complained that he wasn't
''Mexican'' enough. One newspaper writer described him as
a foreigner, though Gerzso was born in Mexico to parents
who were eastern European immigrants.
Even in 1990, the daunting traveling exhibit Mexico: Splendors
of Thirty Centuries skipped over Gerzso.
But his contributions now reap more
recognition, especially with Risking the Abstract: Mexican
Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso, which opened last
year at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California.
This show and its catalog are rich with insights into the
art of 20th Century Mexico and Latin America, as well as
discussion about how Gerzso's fluid early drawings in Ohio
laid the infrastructure for his best and brightest work.
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