Dóra Maurer (Hungary)

Dóra Maurer was a significant figure in both the international and Hungarian art scenes. From 1968 onward, as a Hungarian–Austrian dual citizen, she played an active role in building the international network of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde. Alongside her activity as an art organizer, her engagement in art pedagogy is also remarkable. Her oeuvre, spanning more than six decades, is remarkably diverse in terms of media, yet it is consistently structured around the central idea of examining movement and displacement. From the 1960s onward, this intention to investigate and make visible these processes appears as a unifying concept in her graphic works, just as it does in her use of photography and her films in the 1970s, and later in her painting of recent years. By continuously rethinking the creative principles of the Displacements and Quasi Pictures series begun in the 1970s, Maurer’s art increasingly turned toward painting from the 1980s onward. During this period, she painted geometric grids of lines in different colors and shifted them in relation to one another within the picture plane. Later, she presented the grid using shaped supports — canvas or wooden panels — in the works of the Quod Libet series. In the Overlappings series, begun in the late 1990s, she filled and curved the grid fields already familiar from earlier works with color; thus, the central motif of the paintings became overlapping color fields that appear immaterial and transparent, yet are in fact opaque. Her works are held in the collections of renowned museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin and the Tate Modern, London.