Imago

Christened one of the “Nuevos Tres Grandes,” alongside Carlos Mérida and Rufino Tamayo, Gerzso pioneered abstraction in postwar Mexico, recasting the "indigenismo" of the Muralists in images charged with telluric power and emotion. Following a prolific career in film set design, he dedicated himself fully to painting in 1962, assimilating architectonic geometries and Surrealist mysticism in intense, incandescent renderings of the Mexican landscape. In the mid-1980s, Gerzso worked with Tamarind, a leading and experimental lithography workshop in Albuquerque, as one of nine artists to collaborate on "Mexico Nueve" (1985-87), a binational printmaking and exhibition project to which he contributed two works: "Syn" and the present "Imago". “Lithography interests me because it is a departure from my usual methods of painting,” Gerzso remarked. “You have to learn. All the richness. You also have to learn how to use the limitations.”1 In its finely striated, glowing color and graphic texture, "Imago" exemplifies his facility with the lithographic stone, which sensitively registers the tectonic tension of the surface and its allusive, monolithic forms.

1 Gunther Gerzso, “Gunther Gerzso,” in Mexico Nueve, exh. cat. (Albuquerque, N.M.: Tamarind Institute, 1987), 33.

This text was created in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and written by Patricia Ortega-Miranda.