Dora Maurer obituary | Art and design

Speaking to The Art Newspaper in 2019, Dora Maurer made a surprising claim. She told the interviewer that her business benefited “from a lack of market.”

It seemed a strange thing to say. The Hungarian artist, who died at the age of 88, was about to hold her second show at the White Cube in London. If an exhibition at the legendary Jay Jopling Gallery is the stuff of dreams – his stable includes multi-million-pound giants such as Anselm Kiefer and Damien Hirst – this is not reflected, however, in Maurer’s own prices. One of her paintings was auctioned off at Sotheby’s three years ago for £8,000, a bargain for a major contemporary artist.

All this was about to change. In the month of its exhibition at the Jopling Gallery, another year-long exhibition opened at the Tate Modern. Bringing together 35 pieces from Maurer’s half-century of work, the Tate exhibition was received with bewildered admiration by British critics. From lens-based art to performance to neo-abstraction, here was an artist whose work traced the history of contemporary art, and did so with extraordinary force. However, for the most part, no one has heard of it.

The reason for this – and the lack of a market – was historical. From 1949 to 1989, Hungary was under communist rule. Maurer was in her fifties before she could work in public and appear as she pleased.

Maurer trained as a graphic artist at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (1956–1961), and spent the 1960s and early 1970s making experimental prints that were largely unseen in her country. In her book Traces of a Circle (1974), held at the Tate, she pulled out a series of proofs of the same image, each overlaying the previous image in the form of a palimpsest. She brought these back to her works, which she called “Children’s Patterns,” in which Maurer walked on canvases with paint-covered feet, an omission of Yves Klein and Richard Long.

At the same time, she began working in photography, producing what is perhaps her most famous picture, Seven Twists, in 1979. (Tate’s version, Seven Twists V, was printed in 2011.) In this, the artist folded and refolded her black-and-white photographs into a collage, then held the result up to the camera, her face and hands blending surrealistically with those in the images. Later, in the 1980s, Maurer turned to painting, culminating in richly saturated geometric abstract works such as Phase II, in acrylic on PVC panels (2016).

Like many avant-garde artists under communism, Maurer lived a double artistic life. In public, she toed the official line, becoming an important figure in the teaching of Hungarian art, while also working as a graphic designer. In private, she made works such as Parallel Lines, Analysis (1977), in which a pair of photographers run along opposite balconies of a block of apartments, capturing each other as they go. This duality shaped her work, as did the geography of Budapest. “The Danube, this wide, calm river, which separates the city along an almost north-south axis, is of special importance to me,” Maurer said. The geometric forms of her later abstract paintings seemed always in a state of flux, on their way from one state to another.

Despite all this, Maurer was dissatisfied with his classification as a Hungarian artist. “A Czech art historian when she saw my space painting made in Austria said it was a typical Hungarian work,” she told Art Review magazine in 2012. “Hungarian art has no special character. It was and is European.”

Life was difficult for her as a child under communism. Her father, who died five months before she was born in Budapest, was an officer in the Hungarian army. This, with her bourgeois background, meant that Maurer’s mother lost her widow’s pension after the Communists took control. Although she supported 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 in turn counts against her daughter.

When Maurer applied for a place at the Budapest High School of Visual Arts, her application was quietly rejected. Her mother, bravely, visited the door of the school principal, who agreed to give her daughter a place. When Maurer later applied to the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, she assumed her application would be rejected. To her surprise, she was accepted.

State art schools in the wake of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 were bleak. “The models we drew were boring,” Maurer recalls. “Retired stuntwomen. They had solid, muscular bodies, but they weren’t men.” She contributed to the family finances by painting portraits. When she showed more experimental work in her final year, the academy refused to grant her a diploma.

Things improved after 1963, when foreign travel was allowed again. In 1966, Maurer held a show in Vienna, and returned to the city the following year as a Rockefeller Scholar. There she met fellow Hungarian artist, Tibor Gayor, whom she married the following year. The couple would divide their time between Vienna and Budapest for the next three decades, as part of an independent scene of artists, poets and musicians, who regularly exhibited and performed.

After Maurer received a professorship at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts in 1987, they settled in Budapest, where Maurer finally became a major artist. Since the 2000s, her works have gained international acclaim, and have been included in group shows at the Center Pompidou, Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2015, she had a solo show at Carl Kostyál Gallery in London, and went on to give her first show at White Cube the following year.

Tibor died in 2023.