Dóra Maurer
5 out of 4
Artist
Dóra Maurer
(1937, Budapešť), Hungarian
Original Title
5 out of 4
Date1979
Mediumacrylic on wood
Dimensions190 × 240 cm
Classifications
paintings
Credit LinePrivate collection, long-term loan to Kunsthalle Praha
DescriptionDóra Maurer is an internationally renowned conceptual artist and one of the prominent artists of the Hungarian neo-avantgarde. She was an essential figure of the secluded, independent community of artists, musicians, and poets who created their own culture outside of official structures. Maurer’s conceptually oriented work focused on graphics, photography, film, and painting, which her interdisciplinary approach ties together via themes of movement, small shifts, and the question of perception and transformation. Her interest in these themes stemmed was inspired by processes and phenomena observed in everyday life. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Maurer primarily made graphic art, experimenting with the boundaries of individual forms, with the spatial depth and movement of otherwise static, flat artworks, and with the associative potential of her works. In the late 1960s, her graphic work developed toward a more conceptual approach, with action graphics based on minute differences between individual prints; later, these principles influenced the photographic documentation of her action art. Apart from exploring the possibilities of the movement of different materials, Maurer also experimented with their material qualities, creating sensuous, biomorphic prints thematizing the relationship between reality and the image. Her work with the material dimension of graphic prints largely centred on copper engravings and the necessity of experiments and test prints, which produced different versions of the same work and simultaneously conveyed a rejection of the idea of a finished artwork. This emphasis on the processual and haptic qualities of the work also shifted their perception toward a stronger focus on subjective experience. Maurer’s technique of dropping metal print plates onto the printing surface from a large height imbued the process with an element of unpredictability and uncontrollability. Consequently, small mistakes and damage to the surface became a natural part of the creative process, lending each individual print a unique originality. In the 1970s, Maurer’s work developed more conceptual and objectivist features, also influenced by her interest in philosophy and the manifestos of avantgarde artists. During this time, she also began to work with film. However, instead of moving images, Maurer produced negative film stocks cut into distinct sequences and subsequently enlarged for gelatine silver printing. In 1972, she used this technique to study minimal movements in her work Reversible and Changeable Phases of Movement. The principle of slight shifts in different elements also shaped her abstract paintings and composed paper and frottage drawings. An important component of her later work are paintings pursuing a more immersive dimension, created between 1999 and 2015, which are meant to give the impression of an object in movement and resemble an installation or an object. During the late 1990s, Maurer began using a computer to shape and adjust her pictorial works, utilizing computer animation as well as experimenting with multi-perspectival photography.
The composition 5 out of 4 (1979) comprises several white squares and rectangles with red and blue edges. All of them are in a different state of deconstruction, leading to their fusion with space and concomitant accentuation of movement. This important work from Maurer’s series Displacement demonstrates the influences of conceptualism and her prior experience with graphics, photography, and film sequences on her painterly practice. The manner in which the painting incorporates space also foreshadows Maurer’s later work, where painting adopts the characteristics of installation and object and becomes a means of action.
Dóra Maurer (born 1937, Budapest) studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, graduating in 1961. In 1967, she received the Rockefeller Scholarship in Vienna, where she eventually married Hungarian émigré, artist, and architect Tibor Gáyor, providing her with greater freedom of movement between Vienna and Hungary, as well as the with the opportunity to exhibit in Austria, Germany, and Italy. In the early 1970s, she began spending more time back in Hungary, which also influenced her art. While Maurer’s early work focused on questions of perception as well as on formal references to the history of art. Beginning in the early 1970s, her artworks became marked by an ironic political undertone, conveying the tension between the private and the personal. During this period, Maurer took part in spontaneous group events at the deconsecrated chapel in Balatonboglár, which functioned as hotspot for the development of action and conceptual art until its forced closure in 1973. In 1970, she exhibited at the British International Print Biennale in Bradford, subsequently taking part in the following three editions. Maurer also curated numerous exhibitions and edited various anthologies, including the Hungarian edition of the magazine Schmuck (together with Lászlo Beke), published in the United Kingdom in 1972. She exhibited at the exhibition New Tendencies 5 in Zagreb (1973) as part of an anonymous collective of Hungarian artists. A solo exhibition of her work was held at the Neue Gallerie in Graz (Verschiebungen, 1975), and an exhibition surveying her work from 1958 to 1983 also took place at the Mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna in 1984. Maurer was one of the artists who maintained contact with the Fluxus movement. In 1985, she presented her experimental films for the first time, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (BBS Budapest: Twenty Years of Hungarian Experimental Film). Along with Miklós Erdély, they taught at Ganz-MÁVAG Factory Cultural Centre in Budapest, allowing them to influence the unofficial Hungarian art scene, which they helped find suitable spaces outside the oppressive control of Kádár’s regime. From 1990 to 2007, she was head of the painting studio at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, where she sought to emphasize the interdisciplinary overlaps of painting as a medium. Recent presentations of her work in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago (Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964–1977, 2011), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (Promises of the Past, 2011), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1960–1980, 2015) and the Tate Modern in London (Performing for the Camera, 2016) have helped increase the recognition of her work in an international context. Her most recent retrospective exhibitions took place at the Tate Modern in London (2019) and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld (So sehen und anders sehen, 2022).
The composition 5 out of 4 (1979) comprises several white squares and rectangles with red and blue edges. All of them are in a different state of deconstruction, leading to their fusion with space and concomitant accentuation of movement. This important work from Maurer’s series Displacement demonstrates the influences of conceptualism and her prior experience with graphics, photography, and film sequences on her painterly practice. The manner in which the painting incorporates space also foreshadows Maurer’s later work, where painting adopts the characteristics of installation and object and becomes a means of action.
Dóra Maurer (born 1937, Budapest) studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, graduating in 1961. In 1967, she received the Rockefeller Scholarship in Vienna, where she eventually married Hungarian émigré, artist, and architect Tibor Gáyor, providing her with greater freedom of movement between Vienna and Hungary, as well as the with the opportunity to exhibit in Austria, Germany, and Italy. In the early 1970s, she began spending more time back in Hungary, which also influenced her art. While Maurer’s early work focused on questions of perception as well as on formal references to the history of art. Beginning in the early 1970s, her artworks became marked by an ironic political undertone, conveying the tension between the private and the personal. During this period, Maurer took part in spontaneous group events at the deconsecrated chapel in Balatonboglár, which functioned as hotspot for the development of action and conceptual art until its forced closure in 1973. In 1970, she exhibited at the British International Print Biennale in Bradford, subsequently taking part in the following three editions. Maurer also curated numerous exhibitions and edited various anthologies, including the Hungarian edition of the magazine Schmuck (together with Lászlo Beke), published in the United Kingdom in 1972. She exhibited at the exhibition New Tendencies 5 in Zagreb (1973) as part of an anonymous collective of Hungarian artists. A solo exhibition of her work was held at the Neue Gallerie in Graz (Verschiebungen, 1975), and an exhibition surveying her work from 1958 to 1983 also took place at the Mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna in 1984. Maurer was one of the artists who maintained contact with the Fluxus movement. In 1985, she presented her experimental films for the first time, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (BBS Budapest: Twenty Years of Hungarian Experimental Film). Along with Miklós Erdély, they taught at Ganz-MÁVAG Factory Cultural Centre in Budapest, allowing them to influence the unofficial Hungarian art scene, which they helped find suitable spaces outside the oppressive control of Kádár’s regime. From 1990 to 2007, she was head of the painting studio at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, where she sought to emphasize the interdisciplinary overlaps of painting as a medium. Recent presentations of her work in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago (Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964–1977, 2011), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (Promises of the Past, 2011), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1960–1980, 2015) and the Tate Modern in London (Performing for the Camera, 2016) have helped increase the recognition of her work in an international context. Her most recent retrospective exhibitions took place at the Tate Modern in London (2019) and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld (So sehen und anders sehen, 2022).
