(b. Mexico City, 1915; d. 2000).
This Mexican painter and printmaker was sent by his parents to Lugano, Switzerland, in 1927, to stay with his uncle, an art historian, where he was influenced to become a set designer, and later travelled to Cleveland, Ohio, to study stage design at the Cleveland Playhouse. On his return to Mexico in 1935 he joined the national film industry and worked for years on a large number of films. In 1939 he began to concentrate on painting; he had Julio Castellanos and Juan OGorman as mentors but was essentially self-taught. He was particularly influenced by the Surrealist artists who arrived in Mexico during World War II. The impact of Surrealism was evident in the paintings shown at his first exhibition in 1950, by turns dramatic, witty and erotic. His interest in color already be seen. In the mid-1950s Gerzso moved towards abstraction, basing his first such paintings on prehispanic architecture. Even after 1960, when he began to concentrate on subtle rel
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