Gunther Gerzso
80th Birthday Show
|
 |
|
|
Testimonials
|
|
| To an exemplary artist and not less exemplary friend,
I wish you many
more years in order to continue enjoying your art and your friendship.
|
|
René Solís Mexico, September 7, 1995
|
|
| Gunther is a genius, a giant of the imagination. Gunther sees the
layers of which our world is made. He didn't ask that the world be
complicated and that every perception and articulation be compounded
with the world's intricacy, ambiguity and impermanence. But knowing it
is so, he gives nothing less to us than his candor.
|
|
Hank Hine, Tampa, August 31, 1995
|
|
| ". . .I wonder whether if Andre Breton had seen the totality of
Gerzso's work he might not have been forced to invent a new category of
Surrealism, as he had done in the 1940s in his desire to bring Gorky's
achievement into the Surrealist fold, whether he might not have been
forced to acknowledge the ability of abstract art to challenge our
preconceptions of perceived reality."
|
John Golding, London, 1983,
quoted with permission of the author, September 1995
|
|
| For twenty-seven years Gunther Gerzso and I have shared a friendship.
My appreciation of him comes from knowing the disquiet underlying his
art. But my great affection is from the heart.
|
|
Solomon Grimberg,
Dallas, August 21, 1995
|
|
| I have had the extraordinary privilege of knowing Gunther and Gene
since the inception of his Octavio Paz collaboration. Through various
projects they resided in San Francisco for months at a time. Their old
world grace, razor sharp wit, erudite minds and appreciation for all
things excellent made time spent with them some of the happiest in my
life. Their experiences and their voracious desire to learn span three
continents, four languages and a circle of remarkable people. To know
them has been to expand.
|
|
Dede Hine, Tampa, August 31, 1995
|
|
| The work of Gunther Gerzso pursues the absolute purity of color and
line; it astonishes and captivates as only great painting can do. It
evokes the unique sense of beauty and harmony which conforms to the
universe.
|
|
Mariana Pérez Amor and Alejandra Yturbe, Mexico, August 30,
1995
|
|
| I shall always be grateful to Gunther Gerzso for opening my eyes to the
pleasures of Mexico: its beauty with his art, especially his paintings,
so full of vibrancy and mystery; its charm expressed in his quirky
sense of humor and laconic irony; and, not least of all, its culinary
delights by introducing me to and feeding me my-and probably his-first
and only repast of fried gusanos.
|
|
Ruth Ziegler, New York, September 7, 1995
|
|
| With his unique style, the contribution that Maestro Gunther Gerzso has
made to contemporary painting, establishes him as one of the most solid
figures of our time. To have had the honor of working with him has been
a great experience in our career as editors and printers of graphic
work. Luis and Lea Rem ba, Los Angeles, August 24. 1995 I salute
Gunther Gerzso on the occasion of his 80th birthday exhibition. He has
borne the standard of excellence aloft for so long! He has burned, as
Pater would have said, with a gemlike flame, kindled and rekindled over
so many decades, with absolute integrity. As he knows, I regard him as
an essential figure in the history of Mexican painting whose impress
will remain always, I'm sure.
|
|
Dore Ashton, New York, August 22, 1995
|
|
| Gunther, my friend: As I wish you a happy and healthy 80th, I remember
our early morning conversations driving the bridge to the foundry and
the wonderful stories you told over breakfast in the Korean coffee
shop. I thank you for letting me witness the births of Yaxchilán,
Tollan, Constelación, Semblantes. Come back soon to San Francisco, the
city you love.
|
|
George Belcher, San Francisco, August 17, 1995
|
|
| When Gunther Gerzso was 55 years old of age I wrote:
|
|
His visual
language is unmistakable: planes that suggest landscapes, planes that
suggest architectures, planes thatsuggestmonuments, planes that suggest
walls of a dreamlike environment. His meticulous and sensitive
accumulation of planes transforms at times into forests of resonating
crys to Is, where the eyes perceive whispers and humming.
|
| Now that he
has turned 80, I want to confirm that perception I had then of an
artist who has known how to remain true to himself.
|
|
Raquel Tibol, Mexico, August 27, 1995
|
|
| In 1976 when I was curator for the exhibition Gunther Gerzso: Paintings
and Graphics Reviewed the artist commented to me:
|
|
Churchill used to say
that when he went to Heaven he would dedicate the first million years
to painting to find out what it was all about. And yes, it is true. One
needs as many as five lives and still the only indispensable thing is
constant work.
|
| Almost two decades later one notes that Gerzso, a
perpetually young artist, has continued to follow his artistic destiny.
|
|
Barbara Duncan, New York, August 25, 1995
|
|
| Gerzso calls our attention to the presence in his paintings of the dark
backgrounds that are the equivalent of the nothingness and the fear,
and the intimate relationship between this nothingness and at times
this death, with the splendor of the surface that translates into the
metaphor of the wall or the body that traps his mind. Body, wall, void:
a labyrinth which he constructs like a gallery of self-portraits, by
which the artist affirms that his works express who he is and how the
rest of the world appears from his interior vision. That is to say,
Gerzso paints, as John Golding has said, the landscape of the mind.
Those landscapes are constructed from sacred spaces, as if they were
temples with secret chambers, impenetrable ramparts which hide the
coveted center; but there are also wounded citadels, elegant scars of
an invulnerable secrecy that gives up its mystery only to vertigo. His
painting is a house/body, a luminous mantel in which is revealed a
delicately constructed world of opposites: order and emotion, eros and
death, ice and lava. There, too, are his identities crossing this dark
plane, always behind the hermetic layers of color.
|
|
Rita Eder, Mexico, August 22,1995
|
|
|
|
