Description:

Gunther Gerzso
Mexican, 1915-2000
Naranja-Azul-Verde
oil on masonite
1978, signed and dated lower right, signed, titled and dated en verso, 18 in. x 25 1/2 in., framed, overall 22 in. x 29 1/2 in. x 1 3/4 in.

Provenance: Collection of Sally and the Late Dr. Lawrence O'Meallie, New Orleans.

  • Provenance: One of the most significant Mexican avant-garde artists of the twentieth century, Gunther Gerzso made substantial contributions to both Surrealism and geometric abstraction. Born in Mexico City to a Hungarian Jewish father and a German mother, he held a pivotal role within the international community of Surrealists in the 1940s and 1950s. As a teenager, Gerzso was sent to Lugano, Switzerland to live with his uncle, an art collector and dealer. He returned to the Americas in the early 1930s to work as a set designer for theater and film productions, living between Cleveland, Ohio, and Mexico. With the aim of launching a painting career, he resettled permanently in Mexico City in early 1941. In 1946, Gerzso had a breakthrough that led to the development of his signature style. While travelling around Mexico for his set design projects, he came to deeply appreciate precolonial art and architecture, borrowing from it to paint shimmering scenes of intricate structures. As stated in his official biography:
    He was a mixture of Mexican and German (European) cultures. He accepted that his oil painting technique was evolving to that of traditional European painting. For example, he greatly admired Matthias Grunewald. And he kept exploring his themes which were mostly based on pre-Hispanic Mexican architecture, specifically Altiplano (Toltec, Teotihuacan, Aztec, etc.) and Maya. And yet it seems that he could no longer give up drafting and designing as he had done in the theater and movies for over 30 years. By looking at his artists and design drawings, it is evident that he found a way to explicitly design his paintings as if they were sets.
    Later works such as "Naranja-Azul-Verde" of 1978 offered here move further away from pictorial representation; they are generally characterized by vivid colors and sharply defined patterns of overlapping rectilinear planes, suggestive of both architectural forms and the landscape Gerzso so deeply admired. He utilized rich, jewel-like glazes of color, sharp-edged architectural forms and the suggestion of three-dimensions to transform his paintings into powerful expressions of emotion which he called "landscapes of the spirit."
    Ref.: "Biographies of Gunther Gerzso and His Wife, Gene R. Cady." Gunther Gerzso Archive & Store. www.gunthergerzso.com. Accessed Oct. 20, 2024; "Gunther Gerzso." Art Institute of Chicago. www.artic.edu. Accessed Oct. 20, 2024.
  • Dimensions: 18 in. x 25 1/2 in
  • Medium: oil on masonite
  • Condition: No signs of past restoration; overall good condition; light surface dust; single pinpoint black accretion center right in red; frame has numerous marks, nicks and abrasions

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November 22, 2024 11:00 AM CST
New Orleans, LA, US

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