Dóra MaurerSo sehen und anders sehen

Dóra Maurer (*1937, lives in Budapest) is regarded as a prominent representative of the neo-avant-garde. She thus belongs to those artists who since the 1960s have pursued progressive paths beyond Hungary’s official state cultural policy. Her works, which encompass graphic art, photography, film, action art and painting, display clear conceptual approaches, with perception, movement, displacement and transformation as their central aspects. Abstraction, and in particular the abstraction of the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany, can today be classified as a political “cleansing,” for it stood as a representative of the “open society.” Numerous collections in German museums are oriented accordingly, among them that of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld. In the former Eastern Bloc countries such as Hungary, however, abstraction carried an “oppositional” connotation. Through the non-objective character of her works, which ran counter to the official doctrine of Socialist Realism, Dóra Maurer occupies a special position. This was reinforced by her contacts with and travels to the West, which were possible for her even before 1989 thanks to her dual Hungarian and Austrian citizenship. Her experiments in the media of photography and film in the 1970s, as well as her abstract-geometric works based on processual displacement, reveal an obvious formal parallel with the post-war art of Western Europe and the USA. In truth, however, her works are inconceivable without the experience of life under the communist regime.

Exhibition:
Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 29/1 – 15/5/2022