Lot Essay
Gunther Gerzsó's art is often fueled by primordial forces that shape the archetype of The Great Mother.
As an archetype constellation, The Great Mother is a numinous image, operating out of the human psyche. It is a fusion of positive and negative aspects of beings and energies -products of a divine source- perceived as fascinating, terrible and overpowering.
The Great Mother not only represents the good-mother, and the merciless mother, but also the good-bad mother. She gives life and reclaims it as well. She symbolizes the womb and the tomb.
The dynamic tension that keeps such image alive within us is the lure of passion and the anxiety of being overpowered; a tension that both repels and attracts. This emotional content is projected as the feeling tone that shapes our fantasies, rites, myths and artistic productions.
Gunther Gerzsó's Mythical Personage (1964) grows out of The Great Mother archetype. In one version of Aztec mythology, the snake woman yields to fertility but only after she has been gratified with human sacrifices, re-inforcing the concept of life and death as each feeding off each other.
Thus, Gerzsó's Mythical Personage is a construction of blades suggestive of a female principle. Gerzsó uses warm colors to lure and threatening edged shapes to repel the viewer. Mythical Personage was painted side by side to its male companion Personaje Rojo y Azul (1964) in the Gelman collection.
The seduction of Aztec god Quetzalcóatl by The Great Mother is told in the pre-hispanic song:
"Our Mother
the goddess with the mantle of snakes,
is taking me with her
as her child
I weep"
Salomon Grimberg
Dallas, March 1996
As an archetype constellation, The Great Mother is a numinous image, operating out of the human psyche. It is a fusion of positive and negative aspects of beings and energies -products of a divine source- perceived as fascinating, terrible and overpowering.
The Great Mother not only represents the good-mother, and the merciless mother, but also the good-bad mother. She gives life and reclaims it as well. She symbolizes the womb and the tomb.
The dynamic tension that keeps such image alive within us is the lure of passion and the anxiety of being overpowered; a tension that both repels and attracts. This emotional content is projected as the feeling tone that shapes our fantasies, rites, myths and artistic productions.
Gunther Gerzsó's Mythical Personage (1964) grows out of The Great Mother archetype. In one version of Aztec mythology, the snake woman yields to fertility but only after she has been gratified with human sacrifices, re-inforcing the concept of life and death as each feeding off each other.
Thus, Gerzsó's Mythical Personage is a construction of blades suggestive of a female principle. Gerzsó uses warm colors to lure and threatening edged shapes to repel the viewer. Mythical Personage was painted side by side to its male companion Personaje Rojo y Azul (1964) in the Gelman collection.
The seduction of Aztec god Quetzalcóatl by The Great Mother is told in the pre-hispanic song:
"Our Mother
the goddess with the mantle of snakes,
is taking me with her
as her child
I weep"
Salomon Grimberg
Dallas, March 1996