Dóra Maurer: See like this and see differently Cat. Kunsthalle Bielefeld

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.

Zsuzsa Lá szló is a researcher, curator, and art critic based in Budapest. She is a researcher at Artpool and a lecturer at the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, and at the Institute for Art Theory and Media Studies, ELTE, Budapest. Henrike Mund is an art historian, curatorian and collection director of Kunsthalle Bielefeld. She has worked and published on symbolism, expressionism, modernism and women, as well as numerous artists. Dó ra Maurer (born 1936 in Budapest) is a Hungarian visual artist, filmmaker, exhibition organizer and representative of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde. She is a member of the Szé chenyi Academy of Literature and Art (1995), a corresponding member of the Saxon Academy of Arts (2001) and a founding member of the Open Structures Art Society (OSAS, 2006). Christina Vé gh (born 1970) is a Swiss art historian and curator, she studied art history at the University of Zurich at the University of California in Santa Cruz. She completed her studies, with minors in ethnology and philosophy, with a thesis on the Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo. In 2005, Christina Vé gh took over as director of the Bonn Kunstverein. Succeeding Veit Gö rner, she became the 11th director of the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover 2015 and was the first woman to do so. Since February 2020 she is now the director of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld.