One of the most significant Mexican avant-garde artists of the 20th century, Gunther Gerzso made substantial contributions to both Surrealism and geometric abstraction through his paintings, sculptures, and prints. Influenced by pre-Columbian art and architecture as well as the landscape of his native Mexico, Gerzso was an associate of Benjamin Péret, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and other painters who had taken refuge in Mexico during the war years. Gerzso’s early works such as L’ecartelé (El descuartizado) (1944) drew from and expanded upon the tendencies of European Surrealists, moving closer to abstraction. His later works, such as Rojo-Amarillo-Azul (1969) and Tierra Caliente (1987), move even further away from pictorial representation; they are generally characterized by vivid colors and sharply defined patterns of overlapping rectilinear planes, suggestive of both architectural forms and the landscapes Gerzso so deeply admired.