Dóra Maurer: So sehen und anders sehen

Dóra Maurer occupies a special position

Dóra Maurer (*1937, lives in Budapest) is considered a prominent representative of the neo-avant-garde. She is thus one of the artists who, since the 1960s, have taken progressive paths beyond Hungary's official state cultural policy. Her works, which include graphics, photography, film, action art and painting, show clear conceptual approaches, with perception, movement, displacement and transformation as the central aspects. Abstraction, especially that of the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany, can today be categorised as a political "cleansing", as it was representative of the "open society". Numerous collections in German museums, including that of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, are organised accordingly. In former Eastern Bloc countries such as Hungary, however, abstraction had an "oppositional" connotation. Due to the non-representational nature of her works, which stood in contrast to the official standard of Socialist Realism, Dóra Maurer occupied a special position. This was reinforced by her contacts and travels to the West, which were possible for her even before 1989 due to her dual Hungarian and Austrian citizenship. Her experiments in the media of photography and film in the 1970s and her abstract-geometric works based on processual displacement show an obvious formal parallel to the post-war art of Western Europe and the USA. In fact, however, her works cannot be imagined without the experience of life under the communist regime.

Exhibition:
Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 29/1 - 15/5/2022)