Dora Maurer /H/

6.4.2011 - 5.6.2011

Born in Budapest, Dóra Maurer studied graphics and painting at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (1955–1961). Between 1967 and 1996 she lived alternately in Budapest and in Vienna. In the period 1987–1991 she gave audio-visual courses at the Academy of Applied
Arts and from 1990 she lectured at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Budapest, where she is still emeritus professor. She has won numerous prestigious awards.

The beginnings of her mature and internationally renowned work date back to the 1970s. She creates cycles of works that modify a certain rational system or conceptual basis. She also expanded the scale of media used. Beside the traditional graphic and painting medium, she also uses photography, film, music, speech, performance, assemblage, texts, and others. Her artistic development clearly headed through mathematically and combinatorially arranged photographs of minor hand movements, through body actions and land art to paintings using pure geometrical forms.

In the mid-1970s she started to work on a series of paintings called “Quasi Pictures”. They are geometrical images formed by diagonal multicoloured grids which make up, by moving and overlapping, complex colour structures. Since the 1990s Maurer has been painting simple horizontal and vertical grids, applying the technique of perspective foreshortening, and even concave ones. The central theme thus becomes space and the harmony of colours.

Dóra Maurer has undoubtedly been one of the most brilliant stars of the Hungarian fine arts scene of the past four decades. Important are also her curating and teaching activities.