El nacimiento de los pájaros 1944

Gunther Gerzso made this painting of the birth of birds in no particular year, using geometric shapes and some pretty unusual colours. The painting is a fascinating push-pull of space and form, where the lines carve up the picture plane into sharp facets. These aren't just abstract shapes though; you can make out bird-like forms emerging from the chaos, a tangle of lines and planes constructing themselves right before your eyes. Gerzso’s use of colour here is very intuitive and instinctive, look at the blues on the left against the oranges in the background, these colours feel good together. He's got these lines that create little windows into other worlds; you can almost see the painting breathing. It reminds me a little bit of Picasso, how he used geometry to break down and rebuild the world on canvas. But Gerzso takes it somewhere else, into this weird zone of organic abstraction. It's not about what you see, but how you see it, how the painting makes you feel.