Dóra Maurer – Concise Œuvre

Since the 1970s, Dóra Maurer has been one of the dominant figures of Hungarian art. In addition to her creative work, she has been a major influence on her peers as an active and energetic organizer and, since 2003, a teacher. Her work faithfully reflects her perpetually curious, open-to-everything, constantly-searching personality, her irrepressible desire to experiment, fine intelligence and subtle irony. She works in several fields: in addition to paintings she has produced graphics, photographs, films, collages and installations. Works making use of geometry, colour theory and perception theories are actually playful experiments reflecting the attitude of the informed observer. “Dóra Maurer is not interested in art, but in reality, and the constantly-changing manifestation of reality,” is what Dieter Honisch has written about her.

Her artistic method frequently involves setting up a model situation and then permitting the players (materials and forms) to work on each other. Sometimes, she performs a transformation on the outcome and lets the process run again. She “just” calls her paintings quasi-pictures. She says about herself: “There is within me some antipathy to the ready artistic products of our age. They have what I feel to be a useless durability… Actual implementation cannot have a final significance.” Her entire oeuvre is a logical, consistent course of thought, but without a trace of predictability, and that is what makes it so exciting.

The retrospective exhibition starts off with works displaying the influence of conceptual and geometrical composition, and then presents whole series of works, in a way intended to convey an unfolding art-form diversity and emergent seriality.

The works on display give a clear view of the trends in Maurer’s work: the distortion and virtual spatial inversion of frontally-approached surfaces and the curving of the plane.

The other aspect of the exhibition traces how the standard colours she once used have transformed, and come to life, culminating in the recent Overlapping group with its appeal to colour perception, and space is also devoted to her film and video works, made between 1973 and 1996.

The exhibition has been realised in the framework of a retrospective exhibition series supported by the National Cultural Fund.

On the last week, from February 17 to February 22, the catalogue of the exhibition can be purchased at half price (HUF 2450)!