5/8/2019 – 5/7/2020
The Tate Gallery | London | England
The exhibition brings together a focused selection of works by Dóra Maurer, offering a sustained insight into a practice that has unfolded over more than five decades. Approximately thirty-five pieces — ranging from graphic works and photographs to films and paintings — reveal the breadth of her investigations and the consistency of her conceptual rigor. Across media, Maurer approaches form as a field of experimentation, where systems, perception and movement are tested with a distinctive combination of analytical clarity and playful intelligence.
Maurer was at the centre of an independent community of artists, poets and musicians that championed their own culture outside of the official Hungarian system during the socialist period. They organised exhibitions in apartments and published underground journals.
Trained as a graphic artist in the 1950s, Maurer pushed the medium to its limit in her experimental works of the following two decades. In the 1970s she started to work in photography and moving image, often collaborating with musicians, as well as teaching creative performative workshops. She developed increasingly geometric and abstract drawings and paintings in the 1970s and beyond. The exhibition culminates in a room of her recent paintings, in which overlapping colours create a sense of shapes floating in space..
Movement, displacement, perception and transformation have remained consistent threads in her work. Never tied down to one medium, Maurer remains a unique voice, constantly in motion.
This exhibition will include works from Tate’s collection, major loans from private collections and five works which are promised gifts to Tate.
Dora Maurer (born 1937 in Budapest) is a Hungarian artist whose work has spanned a 50-year career. With an emphasis on photography, film, graphic design, amongst other things, Maurer has made herself a household name in the art world. Principally achieving recognition in the 1970s with avant-garde work, Maurer has developed her art career from works with contemporary and modern influences that have been shown worldwide. All of her art is based on mathematical and complex system processes. Most of Maurer’s work follows the theme of showing options to the viewer and what the viewer can do with those options. Many of her works break down simple actions so the viewer can really view the piece as movement, not a photograph of movement. Dora Maurer has in addition been a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Budapest and a curator.