Dó ra Maurer (born 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
print- making, 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, 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.
