Dóra Maurer, recognized for conceptual images and formed work, 1937–2026

Dóra Maurer, whose conceptual work spanned printmaking, movie, images and collage, has died.

A star in her native Hungary from the Nineteen Seventies onwards, Maurer obtained larger worldwide consideration after her flip within the 2011 Istanbul Biennale. There, curators Jens Hoffman and Adriano Pedrosa included a choice of her 1979 Seven Rotations works, silver print photographic self-portraits that start with the nook of her face poking out from behind a sq. of white card and continues together with her holding the earlier portrait within the collection rotated 45 levels, culminating in a dizzying spiral of arms and peeking eyes.

‘Since a few years ago,’ she informed ArtOverview in 2012, ‘everybody has been interested in my work from the 1970s. Everybody wants to talk about these works and to see them. The administration involved in this disturbs me in my current work.’

Just as common was What Can One Do with a Paving Stone? (1971), that includes 4 rows of three photos exhibiting the artist variously tying and untying, dragging, caressing, wrapping and unwrapping the titular stone. ‘A paving stone is the material of fights – street fighting and so on – and what can you do with a paving stone? Here I made some examples of what I can do with the paving stone. It is ambivalent. You can consider it is as political.’

Later works included a collection of formed canvases, mixed sculpturally, usually with a trompe-l’œil impact, which she titled Overlappings.

Maurer skilled as a graphic artist and, till the late Nineteen Sixties, labored primarily in printmaking earlier than increasing throughout media. She was a very long time professor on the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest and a curator and member of the Open Structures Art Society, which staged exhibitions at Budapest’s Vasarely Museum. In 2019 she had a solo present at Tate Modern, London.

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