During the early stages of his artistic career, Gunther Gerzso was searching for focus and direction in his painting. As young artists commonly do, Gerzso explored the styles of many popular modern movements before he settled completely on his own artistic vocabulary. His earliest works, compiled in the Ireland Collection (Cleveland 1935-1941), he explored the possibilities of surrealism, cubism and the figurative work of his contemporaries. Only after this time did Gerzso's own unique painting language begin to evolve.
After leaving Cleveland in 1941, Gunther traveled to Mexico to galvanize his fledgling painting career. Here, he associated with surrealist artists such as Leonara Carrington, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Peret and was strongly influenced by the work of Giorgio de Chirico. Despite these contacts, Gerzso was frustrated with the slow progress that his career. In 1943, however, he was offered a job to design sets for the film industry and continued in this field for 20 years working on close to 150 films.
Gerzso's mid-career works were strongly influenced by Pre-Columbian art. He drew from the rich architecture of the indigenous cultures of Mexico, incorporating monumentality and surface texture with a bold mix of colors. This would be part of the firm foundation that Gerzso built on in the coming years as he altered and abstracted his style. In 1954, he took a trip to Greece. Works from the Ancient Grecian Period with their highly constructed forms and flatly structured shapes moved Gunther to limit his palette to two or three variations of red, blue, gray, ochre, and black.
During the 1970's, Gerzso explored and initiated a new phase of abstraction that emphasized the interactions of geometric shapes along with Greek inspired subtle nuances of color. This transition marks maturity in the integration of his previous elements of composition and technique. Finding his own expressive voice, Gerzso's new works exhibit a cohesive stylistic resolution, which earmarks his iconographic style.
Naranja-Verde-Azul" and "Blanco-Verde-Ocre" are wonderful examples of Gerzso's unique vision- a mastery of shape, texture, space and precision. In "Naranja-Verde-Azul" the dominant color, a rectangle of vivid green plane, is broken up by variations of green, blue and orange. The subtle changes in shade and hue cause the forms to protrude and retract in an illusion of three dimensionality. The surface of "Blanco-Verde-Ocre" is covered in a richly textured plane of caramelized orange, interrupted by a single crevice of carefully crafted shapes and colors - echoes of "Naranja-Verde-Azul". Together these companion paintings are little jeweled examples of the renowned Gerzso oeuvre.
Gunther Gerzso works have been widely celebrated for their vibrancy, their eloquence, and certainly their ingenuity. "It's ridiculous," Gerzso said, "What happens there on the canvas...some painters thought that what I did was too complicated. To me it's not complicated, because this is the only way I know how."