Dóra Maurer
Concise Œuvre
Dec 05, 2008. – Feb 22, 2009
Museum of Contemporary Art
PALACE OF ARTS
H-1095 Budapest, Komor Marcell u. 1.
Phone (36 1) 555 3444
Fax: (36 1) 555 3458
info [at] lumu.hu
Dóra Maurer is one of the major figures in the Hungarian art scene since the 1970s, both through her art and her influence as a professor of the Hungarian Fine Arts Academy. This retrospective exhibition begins with works from the early seventies, drawing on the influences of conceptualism and geometric composition. By presenting entire series wherever possible, the show aims to demonstrate how versatility of form and seriality that has informed Dóra Maurer’s work. In addition to her initial printed graphics, she has worked with photography and materials found in nature (branches, hair, etc.). Maurer has been also involved in action art and work bordering on body art and feminism, as well as painting.
The tendencies and themes running through her work are clearly apparent from the works in the exhibition: from conceptual photography through quasi-images of standard colours and works created through processes of shifting and distortion or virtual spatial inversion of frontally-conceived surfaces, to the curving of the plane. In another direction, the exhibition traces how the standard colours initially used by Maurer have transformed and taken on new life, culminating in Overlappings, a recent group of works exploring colour perception itself.
One of the rooms presents a mural, as a re-enactment of her 1982 work made in the Buchberg Castle, Austria. The space painted in the artist’s standard colours is lit by differently coloured lights, meant as a study of human colour perception, demonstrating how colours change with the changes of light.
The exhibition also features Dóra Maurer’s film and video works from 1973 to 1996 in the form of a “video library”.
Accompanying Dóra Maurer’s exhibition, a bilingual catalogue has been published in German and Hungarian, including texts by Dieter Honisch and Dieter Bogner, an interview with the artist, as well as a study by art historian Judit Király, analysing Dóra Maurer’s works from a mathematical perspective. The book concludes with a comprehensive catalogue based on the artist’s original notes.
The exhibition has been realised in the framework of a retrospective exhibition series supported by the National Cultural Fund.
The exhibition is curated by Anna Bálványos
