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Talking to the Art Newspaper in 2019, Dóra Maurer made a surprising claim. Her work, she told the interviewer, benefited “from a lack of market”.
It seemed an odd thing to say. The Hungarian artist, who has died aged 88, was about to have her second show at White Cube in London. If an exhibition at Jay Jopling’s fabled gallery was the stuff of dreams – its stable includes such multimillion-pound giants as Anselm Kiefer and Damien Hirst – this was not, however, reflected in Maurer’s own prices. One of her paintings had been auctioned at Sotheby’s three years earlier for £8,000 – a bargain basement figure for a major contemporary artist.
All this was set to change. In the month of her show at Jopling’s gallery, another, year-long exhibition opened at Tate Modern. Bringing together 35 pieces from the half-century of Maurer’s practice, the Tate show was greeted by British critics with baffled admiration. From lens-based art to performance to neo-abstraction, here was an artist whose work tracked the history of contemporary art, and did so with extraordinary power. Yet, for the most part, no one had heard of her.
The reason for this – and for the lack of market – was historical. From 1949 to 1989, Hungary had been under communist rule. Maurer was in her 50s before she could publicly work and show as she wished.
Trained as a graphic artist at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (1956-61), Maurer had spent the 1960s and early 70s making experimental prints that were largely not seen in her own country. In Traces of a Circle (1974), held in the Tate, she pulled a series of proofs of the same image, each overlying the one before as a palimpsest. These harked back to the works she called pedotypes, in which Maurer walked over canvases in paint-covered feet, an elision of Yves Klein and Richard Long.
At the same time, she began to work with photography, producing what is probably her best-known image, Seven Twists, in 1979. (The Tate’s version, Seven Twists V, was printed in 2011.) In this, the artist folded and refolded black-and-white photographs of herself into a collage, then held the result up to the camera, her own face and hands mingling surrealistically with those in the photos. Later, in the 80s, Maurer turned to painting, culminating in richly saturated, geometric abstract works such as Stage II, in acrylic on PVC panels (2016).
Like many avant-garde artists under communism, Maurer lived an artistic double life. In public she toed the official line, becoming an important figure in Hungarian art teaching, while also working as a graphic designer. In private, she made works such as Parallel Lines, Analyses (1977), in which a pair of photographers ran along opposite balconies of a block of flats, snapping each other as they went. This duality shaped her work, as did the geography of Budapest. “The Danube, this wide, peaceful river, separating the town along an almost exact north–south axis, is especially important to me,” Maurer said. The geometric forms of her later, abstract paintings seemed always in flux, on their way from one state to another.
For all that, Maurer resented being pigeonholed as a Hungarian artist. “A Czech art historian said as she saw my Space Painting made in Austria that it is a typical Hungarian work,” she sniffed to Art Review magazine in 2012. “Hungarian art has no special character. It was and is European.”
Life had been hard for her as a child under communism. Her father, who died five months before she was born, in Budapest, had been an officer in the Hungarian army. This, with her own bourgeois background, meant that Maurer’s mother lost her widow’s pension after the communist takeover. Although she provided for herself and her daughter by working shifts in a bandage factory, these proletarian credentials were not enough to erase the stigma of being middle class. This counted in turn against her daughter.
When Maurer applied for a place at Budapest’s Secondary School of Visual Arts, her application was quietly lost. Her mother, undaunted, doorstepped the school’s principal, who agreed to give her daughter a place. When, later, Maurer applied to the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, she assumed she would be turned down. To her surprise, she was accepted.
State art schools in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian uprising were grim. “The models we drew were boring,” Maurer recalled. “Retired female acrobats. They had hard, muscular bodies, but were not men.” She contributed to family finances by doing portraits. When she exhibited her more experimental work in her final year, the academy refused to award her a diploma.
Things improved after 1963, when foreign travel was once more allowed. In 1966, Maurer had a show in Vienna, returning to the city the next year as a Rockefeller scholar. It was there that she met a fellow Hungarian artist, Tibor Gáyor, whom she married the following year. The couple would divide their time between Vienna and Budapest for the next three decades, part of an independent scene of artists, poets and musicians, showing and performing regularly.
After Maurer was given a professorship at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts in 1987, they settled in Budapest, where Maurer finally became established as a major artist. From the 2000s her work gained prominence internationally, and was included in group shows at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and MoMA, New York. In 2015, she had a solo show at Carl Kostyál gallery in London, going on to have her first show at White Cube the following year.
Tibor died in 2023.
