Seven Rotations 1 – 6, 1979
Dóra Maurer
Whitechapel Gallery
Dóra Maurer, a multimedia artist who was a monumental figure of the Hungarian art scene, died on February 14th at the age of 88. Her death was confirmed by the the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Art in Budapest, where she had served as president since 2017.
The artist’s work spans painting, printmaking, film, sculpture, photography, performance, and collage. She was fascinated by motion, and the way that forms are transformed by time and space. Over the course of her more than 50-year career, she produced experimental work using geometry and color theory that was grounded in playful investigation. “My whole way of thinking comes less from painting; my approach is much more influenced by my long years of conceptual and conceptional activity,” the artist once said of her work, according to a text published by White Cube, which represented the artist along with Carl Kostyál.
Maurer was born in Budapest in 1937. She studied painting and graphic arts at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts during the Hungarian revolution. She graduated in 1961 and began working as a printmaker, before expanding her practice to include painting and photography towards the end of the 1960s. Her marriage to Austrian artist Tibor Gáyor in 1967 allowed her the opportunity to travel between Budapest and Vienna, which gave her a unique perspective on both sides of the Iron Curtain that was reflected in her work.
The 1970s were her most productive decade, producing some of her best-known works including Quasi-images (1970–73), Seven Twists (1979), and her Reversible and Changeable Phases of Movement (1970s) series. Color began to show up in her work in the 1980s as the communist regime imposed less control over artists, and in 1990 she began teaching at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. During this time she traveled back and forth between Hungary and Austria, sometimes smuggling other Hungarian artists’ work with her.
While she had been a star in her native Hungary since the 1970s, she only received greater international acclaim later in life. Curators Jens Hoffman and Adriano Pedrosa included a selection of her 1979 Seven Rotations dizzying self portraits in the 2011 Istanbul Biennale, which led to group shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Prominent solo shows have been held at the Tate Modern in 2019, and the Museum Ritter in 2014. Her work is held in prominent collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Neue Nationalgalerie. In 2021 she was awarded the Artist of the Nation award, a Hungarian state honor for cultural achievements.
