Dóra Maurer Munkácsy and Kossuth Prize-winning graphic artist, painter, filmmaker, art teacher. Professor Emerita of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. Art organizer. A prominent representative of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde. After her highly successful solo exhibition at the White Cube in London last year, she is now exhibiting at the Modern Gallery - László Vass Collection in Veszprém.
The exhibition is opened by Judit Geskó, Head of the Post-1800 Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts
Curators of the exhibition: Dóra Maurer, Attila Pőcze, László Hegyeshalmi
Subject of the Monitoring
Dóra Maurer has a playful, witty and feminine side, while the other is firm, precise and regular. It is largely thanks to her that concrete, systematic and serial art exhibitions have been held in Hungary since the 1970s. Maurer's serial works, however, are rarely without a conceptual element, an example being her series in which the coloured bands painted on a white ground follow the frame of each canvas, but the vertical leg of the frame on the right is 'shifted' to the next picture surface.
The concrete art also includes quasi-images, a genre that is also associated with shifts and can be traced back to the study of the magic square. As Maurer explains, "The starting point and the scene are a 5:4 rectangular area divided vertically and horizontally by a grid of lines into 10x10 units. Within this area lie two coinciding flat layers. Both layers are divided into four equal fields, the lower layer being indicated by warm lines and the upper layer by cold lines, which are elements of a rule-based move. The fields are arranged in a sequence, one after the other moving from left to right according to the units of the network. The diagonal movement of the cold colours and the horizontal-vertical movement of the warm colours create complex masking situations."
The quasi-picture is a felicitous expression of the fact that these painted works are not really pictures (they are not "representations" or "representations" of something). From this, a wide variety of possibilities for "image" making are offered: enlargements of elements sliding on top of each other, "projections", anamorphoses, "soft corners", from 1986 onwards the cutting out of "empty" fields from the projections of the image and thus creating real transparent grids of space, the breaking up of the grid constellation into irregular shapes. The most ambitious application of the method to date is the Quasi-image of Space in the Buchberg Castle (1982), where Maurer projected a constellation previously constructed in a plane onto the walls and floor of an irregular vaulted room, ignoring the specific characteristics of the space. (A film documenting the work, Painting Space was made in 1983.) The 'imposition' of the aesthetic concept on the environment is almost 'made good', i.e. reversed, in the solutions in which Maurer repainted the figure seen from the side, in a highly abbreviated form.
It was in the painted space of Buchberg that Maurer first began to observe the changes in the colours of his quasi-paintings as a result of changing lighting. Painting the colour changes of a system of eight chosen colours over and over again, she arrived at a kind of Hommage à Monet series, which she called "relative quasi-pictures". "... the relative quasi-picture is a picture in the Impressionist sense - Hommage à Monet - with its fractured or flashed, inverted colours, metaphorical colours that give space to associations. (...) The colours of the original, standard quasi-picture are hardly mixed, conceptual, industrial colours.
The changes in light are imparted to them by another, external system, which causes them to become almost indefinable qualities. Standard colours are alive: they are capable of change, responding to all circumstances. The colours of relative quasi-images are empirical colours, they absorb extreme light conditions, they fade out. I can think of two ways of capturing colour changes: one is to illuminate a large-scale quasi-image made for this purpose with slowly changing artificial coloured light and to evoke the optical sensation of colour transitions before the eyes of the viewer. The other is to observe the effect of the changes in colour temperature of natural light on the standard colours of a suitable quasi-image in a state of almost constant readiness and to reconstruct it as faithfully as possible." The concept of the quasi-image has been in constant evolution, since around 1991 it began to become independent of the false image (Slipped Quasi-image ) and as the artist notes in a memo "the quality of the initial colours was also called into question". The surprising system of effects of the interplay of colours, the possibilities of additive and subtractive ways of mixing colours that appeal to the eye's perception of space and time, have been explored in detail in Maurer's work over the years.
Веkе László
excerpt and topical supplement from a study published in Maurer's Works 1970-1993 catalogue
Dóra Maurer
Budapest, 1937
Artist. Graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1961, majoring in painting and graphics. Between 1975-77 she leads a course entitled Creativity Exercises at Ganz-Mávag Factory with Miklós Erdély. Besides her creative work her pedagogical and art organizing activities are also important. She is active in several genres. In addition to her paintings she makes graphics, photographs, films and installations. Her series using various theories of geometry, colour theory and perception are at once playful experiments and scientific observations.
