The first section addresses his developmental years at the Cleveland Play House in Cleveland, Ohio, and Mexico City in the 1930s and early 1940s -Gerzso’s beginnings as a set designer and self-taught painter. This section features recently discovered works that emphasize the impact of the Depression and impending World War on his art.

The next section focuses on the artist’s Surrealist period of the 1940s, during which he developed close ties with the European Surrealists who came as refugees to Mexico, such as Leonora Carrington, Wolfgang Paalen, Benjamin Péret, and Remedios Varo. Gerzso’s experimentation with Surrealist form and content resulted in psychological landscapes that served as an important step in the development of his mature abstraction.

The early mature years of the late 1940s and 1950s mark the emergence of Gerzso's signature style. In this period, Gerzso turned toward an expressive geometric abstraction that still referred to objective reality. Fascinated by Maya and Aztec ruins, Gerzso strongly identified with the use of the square in pre-Columbian architecture and transformed this fundamental shape into an icon.

Gerzso’s work on location as a film set designer encouraged his love for Mexico and its pre-Columbian architecture. Risking the Abstract’s accompanying publication examines the development of film in Mexico as a mass medium and the significant achievements that Gerzso made to this new form of entertainment. "He existed across worlds," said du Pont. "He circulated as a successful set designer in the mass medium of film, while also navigating the narrower confines of fine art painting."

The exhibition’s centerpiece -the fully mature years of 1950s and 1960s -features the singular achievements that distinguish the artist’s career. This section explores Gerzso’s important relationship to Abstract Expressionism in the United States and to Informalismo/ Art Informel in Europe and how he responded to these latest ideas in art by developing a poetic form of abstraction that was at once indigenous and international.

The fully mature years also contain a number of thematic subsections including his Greek paintings, a series of works-on-paper illustrating his exquisite and innovate techniques, his musings on the modern cityscape, his optimistic belief in space-age exploration, and his ongoing observations on the subject of woman. The final grouping of paintings and works-on-paper represent Gerzso's last decade, when he worked into his eighties and explored both the peace and disquiet of the end of life.

"Working independently from the mainstream, Gerzso risked abstraction at a time when such risk was not rewarded, but he followed his own individual path anyway," concludes du Pont. " In this unusual position he was in Mexican painting a symbolic bridge between Surrealism and the new wave of Mexican art that became known as La Ruptura.

As the next generation of Mexican artists said, "it was Gerzso who started a new revolution in the 1950s.’"

Read the New York Times review Just for Art, Mexican Broke the Mold