Gnther Gerzso

Personal

Vocation

Notable

Mexican painter, set designer and director and screenwriter for film and theatre. During the 1940s and '50s he made various set designs for Mexican, French and American films. He won a total of five Premios Ariel (The Mexican Equivalent of the Oscars) for Best Production Design as well as two more honorary Ariel Awards in 1994 and 2000. During this time he collaborated with directors like Emilio "El Indio" Fernández in Un Día de Vida (1950); Luis Buñuel in Susana (1951), Una Mujer sin Amor (1952) and El rio y la muerte (1955); Yves Allégret in Les Orgueilleux (1953), and John Huston in Under the Volcano (1984). In the late 1930s Gerzso also started painting as a hobby. He entered the annual Art Exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art where two of his works were selected. It was then that Gunther Gerzso started considering himself a painter more than a set designer. In 1941 Gerzso and his wife moved permanently to Mexico City and in 1944 he joined a group of surrealist painters that had taken refuge from the Second World War in Mexico. These artists were Benjamin Péret, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Alice Rahon and Wolfgang Paalen. His works from this period show a clear surrealist influence, which he later abandoned when he started working his famous abstracts. Gunther Gerzso died on 21 April 2000, aged 84. Link to Wikipedia biography