Dóra Maurer's exhibition in Vaszary Gallery

The thematic focus of the exhibition is on the so-called homage (meaning tribute, or respect to) of the artist’s oeuvre. A tour of the 12 rooms in the Vasary villa’s chambers reveals the technical and media diversity of the artist’s creative work over more than six decades.

The artist’s etchings from 1963-1969, her early creative period, are best described by art historians as surrealist. Later, Dóra Maurer’s prints, with their innovative approach to capturing subjective impressions, became increasingly abstract. Art history ranks her alongside Béla Kondor, János Major and László Lakner as one of the great innovators of Hungarian graphic art.

“In the 1970s, in addition to the slow move away from mimetic character, consistent problems that fundamentally determined the entire oeuvre came to the fore, such as the theoretical and practical problems of print reproduction. In this period, the artist’s attention was directed towards recording the processes and phenomena around her, rather than observing natural images and their spectacular representation. Maurer recorded and captured different types of phenomena of abandonment in different types of media.

For her 1971 pedotypes, she used papier mache, and for her graphic sheets, plates and aquatints deformed by certain interventions. And in her works of 1970, photography became a technique increasingly used to capture repetitive movements and the temporal factor.

In addition to the above-mentioned types of work, the exhibition also includes homage works and paraphrases of great masters such as El Greco, Monet, Joseph Hoffman, Raphael, Dürer, Vasarely and Kassák,” exhibition’s curator Mónika Zsikla explains.

The exhibition “The Thematisation of Structure” is opened by Dr. László Baán, Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, in mid-September.