Dóra Maurer: “Relative Quasi Image” 1996 Private collection © Dóra Maurer Photo: Vintage Galéria / András Bozsó.
Tate Modern stages first UK survey of Dóra Maurer From 5 August 2019 to 5 July 2020, Tate Modern showcases the pioneering and playful work of Dóra Maurer (b.1937, Budapest) in a year long, free exhibition.]]>
Source: Tate Modern
This is the first UK survey to celebrate Maurer’s five-decade career, bringing together 35 works from her conceptual photographic series and experimental films to her colourful graphic works and striking geometric paintings. It opens alongside a selection of new free displays across Tate Modern, including Sol LeWitt, David Goldblatt and Franciszka and Stefan Themerson.
Dóra Maurer emerged as part of a generation of neo-avant-garde Hungarian artists in the 1960s, pursuing highly experimental work in parallel to the ‘official’ art system of the socialist regime. As an artist, teacher and curator she developed an international network across Europe and became a hugely influential figure for younger artists. The five room show at Tate Modern spans this diverse career, focusing on the themes of movement, displacement, perception and transformation that she continues to explore in her work today.
Trained as a graphic artist and printmaker in the 1950s, Maurer quickly began pushing the medium to its limits in her early works. The innovative “Seven Foldings” 1975, for example, involved folding an aluminium printing plate seven times before taking an impression. She then moved towards conceptual photographic series and experimental filmmaking, often exploring abstract sequences and the analysis of everyday gestures.
As her work became more geometric and abstract, Maurer explored system-based painting and the way in which geometric forms are affected by colour and perception. In 1983, a commission for a site-specific project at Schloss Buchberg, near Vienna, gave her the opportunity to expand her painting into three-dimensional space, marking an important shift in her work.
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