Photo by Miklos Sulyok. Courtesy the artist

Dóra Maurer, "Overlappings No 37" (2007). Wooden plate, canvas, and acrylic paint, 36 x 53˝ in.

Photo by Miklos Sulyok. Courtesy the artist

Dóra Maurer, "130: Shifts 2"(1975). Drypoint and embossing on two sheets of paper, each 27˝ x 19˝ in.

   November 2008 Field Guide

William Eggleston

Anton Kannemeyer

The Brussels Dream

Lynne Marsh

Frances Stark

Donald Rodney

Oranges and Sardines

Renzo Martens

Munio Weinraub and Amos Gitai

Sharon Lockhart

Stephan Balkenhol

Terence Gower

Jacques Bedel

Josef Albers FIAC’s Cour Carrée “So Good It’s Scary” Keeping the Faith When in Basel for... Art Basel Rummaging Through Rauschenberg’s Trash An Elegant Mind Giorgio Morandi [Husbands and] Wives

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The formal and conceptual rigor of Dóra Maurer’s oeuvre has remained consistent, even while her process-oriented work—made over a nearly 50-year career—has embraced new forms and ideas. As Maurer once said, “I have always felt a certain aversion to ‘finished’ artworks of our time; their durability strikes me as useless.” Born in Budapest in 1937, she is one of the defining Hungarian artists of the 20th century, as well as a famous teacher at Budapest’s art academies. And despite her embrace of the 1970s avant-garde— an openness demonstrated by her many experimental films and Conceptualist-tinged actions that explored time and chance in equal measure—her drawings have hewed close to Concrete art’s original insistence on works constructed from purely plastic elements like planes and colors. In recent pieces like Overlappings 7 (2001), swooping surfaces of acrylic color overlap to form grids of new hues, conjuring up a more athletic and flexible version of Josef Albers’s geometric labors (imagine his Homage to the Square with a regular yoga practice). The Maurer survey opening this month in the city of the artist’s birth includes such work, as well as a library of her films dating from 1973 to 1996.

"Dóra Maurer" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.