Roger von Gunten, great colorist associated with the Breakup Generation, has died

The Swiss-Mexican painter and sculptor Roger von Gunten (Zurich, 1933), identified with the Generation of Rupture, died early yesterday morning at his home in Tepoztlán, Morelos. On January 29, the Cuernavaca Institute of Culture had paid tribute to him with the exhibition Roger von Gunten: A path with heart in the face of the evidence of the senseswith a representative selection of his work, open at the City Museum, an event he did not attend due to a sudden health problem. His son Dylan came in his place. The artist would have turned 93 on March 29.

According to Rosa Velasco, his partner of 30 years, Von Gunten suffered a fall three weeks ago, from which he experienced a deterioration in his health. “He didn’t leave sick or suffering, nor in pain. He just went off, off, off, and left us,” he told The Day the also painter.

Von Gunten’s work is characterized by vibrant colors and abstract figures inspired by botany, Mexican nature, and a “personal mythology,” as it related to his past and what was happening to him in the present. A great colorist, he also related tones with the mythological: “music has melody, harmony and rhythm, and painting, color, shape and – something that matters to me – the invoice or the movement of the hand. That’s what I think when you draw an environment and see how it fills it, which goes against the expansive nature of the color that extends until it bumps into another and says: here I start.”

Young Roger arrived in Mexico in the 1950s with the idea of ​​traveling the Pan-American Highway to Patagonia; However, the landscape, its inhabitants and in particular the architecture and muralism admired in Ciudad Universitaria made him change his mind and settle here in 1957. In 2014 he was awarded the Fine Arts Medal, the highest award granted by the country through the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature.

Von Gunten learned to paint alongside his father, who took up the brushes amateurishly on the weekends. As a child he wanted to be a musician, but that interest did not prosper and he studied painting and graphic design from 1947 to 1952 at the Zurich Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) under the direction of Johannes Itten, artist and former professor at the Bauhaus School. In Mexico he studied at the Universidad Iberoamericana, where he learned metal engraving with Guillermo Silva Santamaría. He held his first exhibition in the country at the legendary Antonio Souza Gallery, in 1957.

Figures without outline

He interacted with several young painters of the time such as José Luis Cuevas, Manuel Felguérez, Lilia Carrillo, Fernando García Ponce and Vicente Rojo, with the aim of making his way in the future of art in Mexico.

Around 2014, the artist’s abstract figures lost their outline. “I just felt that it was more splendid not to use a contour that restricts the constructions of color. I can’t explain it technically, I just feel that it is something more expressive,” he told The Day in 2016. He maintained that art is “a splendor of human existence. You have an exaltation as a simile, use as a landscape illuminated by a rainbow. You can physically explain what the rainbow is, but its presence is something more, an exaltation of the landscape. I also want that in my paintings,” he specified on the occasion of the exhibition The gift of giving yourself in artin the now defunct Juan Martín Gallery.

Von Gunten entered the Payment in Kind Collection of the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit (SHCP) in 1977. He was one of the 13 artists from the instance’s collections who starred in the first season of the television series A trajectory, a collectionmade in co-production with the Public Broadcasting System of the Mexican State. On the occasion of his 90th birthday, the SHCP Art Museum organized an exhibition for him in the Old Archbishop’s Palace.

Naturalized Mexican in 1980, Von Gunten was the subject of retrospective exhibitions in 1978 at the Museum of Modern Art and in 1989 at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes. The latter traveled to the Cabañas and Veracruzano Institutes of Culture. In 2021, the National Museum of Prints highlighted its graphic work with the exhibition A path taken, which brought together 58 pieces created by the artist between 1961 and 2016, among which were prints, books and folders that are characterized by the mastery of drawing, figuration, the assembly of areas, the management of color, as well as the frequent presence of the female figure and elements of nature.

In 1986, the artist faced a lawsuit from a promoter of pictorial works that involved him in a legal process that lasted more than two decades and represented an economic and property loss for him.

Roger von Gunten will be laid to rest at his home in Tepoztlán. His remains will be cremated, but their final destination is still unknown.