Dora Maurer: See like this and see differently

Dóra Maurer occupies a special positionDóra Maurer (*1937, lives in Budapest) is con­sidered a prominent figure on the Hungarian neo-avant-garde scene. She is one of the artists who have been taking progressive paths outside of Hungary s official state cultural policies since the 1960s. Her work in the mediums of print­making, photographs, film, performance art, and painting features a conceptual approach. Major aspects are perception, movement, displace­ment, and transformation. In the early years of West-Germany, abstract art was intro­duced as a poli­tical new beginning in that it represented the so-called open society. Accordingly, numerous ­collections in German museums are oriented ­toward this, including the one at the Kunsthalle ­Bielefeld (Dóra Maurer exhibition in Bielefeld 29/1 15/5/2022), whose building was designed by the US-American architect Philip Johnson. While ­abstract art in the West was considered »free of ideologies« and instrumentalized as such, ­abstraction in countries such as Hungary, which was part of the Eastern bloc at the time, certainly had an »oppositional« connotation. Due to both the non-representational nature of her works as well as her contacts and travels in the West prior to 1989 (permitted thanks to her Hungarian-Austrian dual citizenship), Maurer occupies a special position within the Hungarian art world, which in those days was mainly dominated by ­Socialist Realism. In her experiments in photog­raphy and film in the 1970s, as well as in her ­abstract, geometric works based on a process of displacement, there are obvious parallels to Western European and US-American post-war art. In fact, however, her oeuvre is inconceivable with­out her experience of life under the official Hungarian system during the socialist period.