Dóra Maurer at Kunsthalle Bielefeld

A major survey by Dóra Maurer at Kunsthalle Bielefeld explores the artist’s geometric works, photography and film in the context of her politicised experiences on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Coinciding with a presentation of German and American Conceptual and Minimalist art from the museum’s collection, the exhibition contextualises the artist’s activities in the primarily male-dominated field of abstract art, as well as the experiments she developed in the 1970s.

Maurer has served as a role model for young artists in Hungary, particularly through her work as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. Featuring around 60 of Maurer’s drawings, films, photographs and paintings from five decades, the exhibition will invite a dialogue between the artist’s current practices and the political charge of her earlier work. In What Can One Do with a Paving Stone (1971), Maurer is photographed wrapping and unwrapping the eponymous found object, which at the time was a fraught symbol of the Hungarian Revolution. Maurer's practice was guided by movement and change, which she has described as ‘the basis of my mode of survival…both from a personal and artistic standpoint'. While her work in film and photography employed rudimentary methods to explore how resistance could be achieved through the simplest of means, her drawings and paintings conjured a semblance of movement through subtle shifts in form. This exhibition celebrates Maurer’s achievements as an artist who has continually investigated the relationship between colour and light, and the limits of perception.