The early 1940s were formative years for Gunther Gerzso, who became part of an intellectual set of European émigrés who left war-torn Europe and found fertile artistic ground in Mexico. Among its members were British painter Leonora Carrington, the Spanish artist Remedios Varo and her husband, the poet Benjamin Péret, Austrian-born painter Wolfgang Paalen with his French wife, the poet Alice Rahon, and critic André Breton, who declared in 1938 that “Mexico is a Surrealist country par excellence” and organized the first international surrealist exhibition in Mexico City in 1940.

This small show of Gunther Gerzso's early works includes paintings, drawings and watercolors from the artist’s surrealist period, among them an arresting Self-Portrait and an extremely rare narrative painting entitled “Naufragio” (Shipwreck), both from 1945. Writing of “Naufragio,” curator Diana DuPont observes that the painting “addresses the theme of human destruction against the backdrop of world war, depicting a shipwreck on a dark, story night during which human and nautical forms are brutally ripped apart.  Muscular body fragments partially transform into sinewy, billowing shapes that pulsate with a rhythmic but sinister energy….”