Gunther Gerzso
80th Birthday Show

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Visiting Gunther Gerzso
Mary-Anne Martin

So many years later, with thirteen years in an auction house behind me and thirteen years since I started my gallery, I still know no painter quite like Gunther Gerzso.

I'm not exactly sure of the first time that I met him. The Gerzso house in San Angel felt like a cool sanctuary with leafy gardens visible from within. I immediately liked this avuncular figure with a sardonic wit who reminded me of my Viennese father. "I was assembled in Mexico," he told me when I ask him about his European ancestry. I liked his wife Gene, who had her own sense of humor and who understood what made Gerzso tick. There were acres of bookshelves and paintings hanging everywhere. The Gerzsos were people that I would have liked to be with under any circumstances. That Gunther happened also to be a great painter was a fact completely apart.

5. Presence of the Past, 1953

Going up to Gunther's studio for the first time is impressive. There is an exterior staircase leading to a room with an alcove. Everything seems spotless. No drips of paint on the floor, no evidence of furious creativity. Just one painting in progress on the easel, and possibly a work that is finished and wrapped up neatly in brown paper waiting to be picked up. More books. A collection of tacky snow domes sent from all over by friends who know he thinks they are funny. If Gunther feels expansive he will open up a few drawers in the flat files and show you some recent prints. Or he will take you to the "Cemetery," where he keeps paintings that he has started and has abandoned at some stumbling point. Sometimes he will show you a work from a style that he tried and discarded-perhaps a dada collage. On another occasion he will give you a glimpse of his archives. Here he keeps a pencil sketch of almost every painting he has made, together with notations about the medium, its present whereabouts. In most cases he has a good transparency of the painting as well. In this meticulous record keeping he is like Klee or Kandinsky.

The comparison to Kandinsky is not accidental. Gerzso's studio is orderly, his mind is disciplined, his paintings are the product of a reasoned aesthetic. Here is visual music: endless themes and variations, full of harmony, color, discordant notes, tensions and peaceful resolutions. Gerzso works like a composer, orchestrating his compositions. He cannot run out of ideas; the notes can be replayed in countless arrangements.

Gunther Gerzso is Mexican. Trained in Europe not as a painter but as an art historian, he returned to the land where he was born and developed an artistic vocabulary that is his alone. He copies no other master. He celebrates the landscape of Mexico and its pre-Columbian beginnings. He paints the heart and soul of Mexico.

Celebrating Gunther Gerzso's 80th birthday with a show in his honor seems right. In 1982 we inaugurated this gallery with a Gerzso retrospective show in Paris at FIAC, organized with our friends and associates, Mariana Pérez Amor and Alejandra Yturbe of the Galería de Arte Mexicano. The following year we again collaborated with GAM in the publication with Edicions du Griffon in Neuchâtel, Switzerland of an important monograph on Gerzso with texts by Octavio Paz and John Golding. In 1984 we presented this book at Mary-Anne Martin/Fine Art at the opening of Gerzso's first New York retrospective show. Since then we have collaborated in the publication of Gerzso's first suite of bronze sculptures, an idea born of the friendship among three Gerzso admirers: George Belcher, who kept insisting that Gerzso's work would translate into bronze; Hank Hine, who had the knowledge and San Francisco facilities to make this possible; I was the third partner, who was able to put everyone together, offer moral support from the East Coast and make occasional trips to the West Coast when progress seemed to be slowing down and I felt things needed stirring up.

A wonderful half-brother of the sculpture project was the production of Gerzso's first color etchings, the magnificent Palabras Grabadas suite. Production of the sculptures obliged Gerzso to spend two or more months at a time in San Francisco. Still there were lulls, pockets of time between the fabrication of the maquettes and the development of the molds; more time between production of the bronze casts and patination. Sensing that Gerszo needed to occupy himself with more than shopping during these hiatuses, Hank Hine suggested that the artist create some color etchings at the Limestone Press, Hine's print studio. Although Gerzso had produced lithographs before and silkscreens as well, he had made only one etching up till then, a small black and white experiment. The Limestone experience was a great success and the resulting portfolio of ten etchings by Gerzso accompanied by ten poems by Octavio Paz was published in 1990. Gerzso was encouraged by Hine to produce a suite of five large etchings and aquatints from 1993-5 which Mary-Anne Martin/Fine Art exhibited at ArtMiami '95. In 1995 they produced a series of twelve Temples, evoking Mexican archeological sites, small lyrical etchings printed in dark green ink. These Temples, with accompanying poetry by Dr. Hine, will be presented to the public for the first time at Gerzso's 80th birthday show at Mary-Anne Martin/Fine Art.

38. Temples, 1995

To mark this show as a special event we have asked a number of writers, critics and colleagues to send us a few words of tribute to Gerzso. These are our birthday greetings to him, printed on the following pages.

All these years have passed swiftly. There have been periods of sadness and illness, frightening moments. Gerzso has survived a heart bypass operation and paints with renewed appreciation of life. I no longer bring him Swiss chocolates when I visit him at his studio as I know he must watch his weight. I look forward to our visits. Gunther and Gene are old friends.

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