Maurer, Dóra: Bent Plane with Wings (1996)

Dóra Maurer is a living legend of Hungarian fine art. Since the 1970s, her work has been a decisive part of contemporary Hungarian art. Her works faithfully reflect her always curious, open-minded personality, always searching for something new, her never-failing willingness to experiment, her clever wit and subtle irony. Using geometry, colour theory and theories of perception, her works are in fact playful experiments that reflect her observer-scientist attitude. From the 1970s onwards, she created her compositions bordered by black-red-orange-blue-green stripes, diagonally striped, of varying sizes, by superimposing imaginary rectangles as planes, sliding them over each other. In 1982, she painted these coloured stripes projected onto the irregular walls of the chapel of the castle in Buchberg, Austria. The straight lines thus appeared bent on the curves and broken at the corners. From the 1990s onwards, abandoning diagonal stripes, she made several compositions in which these planes appear projected onto curved surfaces, creating an illusion of the third dimension. One of the main works in this series is Curved Plane, Winged, which, with its curved lines, breaks through the walls of the exhibition space to create an imaginary space.

Anna Bálványos