Dora Maurer: Creative Geometry

Seven Twists - Dora Maurer. Tate Photography

‘I never wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be a gardener, or working in a forest.’
Dora Maurer

I recently visited an exhibition of the work of Hungarian artist Dora Maurer (Tate Modern until 24 January 2021).

Born in Budapest in 1937, Maurer grew up under a Communist regime that was suspicious of progressive thinking. She trained in graphics, and in the 1960s joined a group of radical artists who met and exhibited in private flats, culture centres and student clubs. 

‘It was a grey life. It was no view to the future.’

Maurer worked in film and photography, in painting, performance and sculpture. She was fascinated with series, systems and sequences; with patterns, rhythms and repetition. 

In rudimentary black and white, Maurer films a cylinder from a swinging camera, on a swaying table, with a swooping light source. She shoots her studio sliced into three horizontal sections, and makes the sections rock backwards and forwards to a woozy, out-of-kilter rhythm. She records the infinite small gestures of a hand; the habituated motion of a man sitting on a chair. She runs along the balcony of a block of flats photographing another artist who is doing exactly the same thing, at the same time, on the opposite balcony. 

'My work has been based on change, shifting, traces, temporality from various perspectives.’

Dóra Maurer, Reversible and Changeable Phases of MovementsNo.6 1972. © Dóra Maurer.

There’s a quiet subversion in much of Maurer work. A young girl tramps out red circles on crumpled newsprint. It is May 1st when workers traditionally join organised collective parades. In another piece Maurer wraps and unwraps a paving stone, cradles it, washes it and ties it up. For Cold War Hungarians paving stones had a particular resonance because they were often pulled up and thrown in street protests.

‘As conceptual art came into the eastern part of Europe it was for me an opening. Everything I couldn’t use as an art object before I could use as an art idea... It was much more open. The world was open.’

With limited resources available to her, Maurer’s work is simple and conceptual. She is more concerned with process and technique than with a finessed end product.

‘Generally I am not as interested in the finished work as I am in the way it comes about, which is to say the question of realising a task I have set myself, the idea.’

Maurer’s ideas often begin with mathematics. She employs formulae to organise lines, equations to calculate sizes, rules to establish colour sequences. She carefully scratches, folds and bends; doubles, redoubles and divides. 

‘The identicalness and difference between objects, their seriality aroused my childhood interest in calculus and arithmetic. Geometry provides the framework for arrangement.’

Dóra Maurer Relative Quasi Image 1996 © Dóra Maurer Photo: Vintage Galéria / András Bozsó

What, you may ask, has mathematics to do with art? Surely calculation and computation are a world away from creativity and invention. Maurer sees that there are rhythms, patterns and sequences in nature and everyday life. Routine and repetition are at the root of all our behaviours and beliefs.

Many characterise creativity as something chaotic and disordered that emerges out of nowhere, that occurs in a vacuum. But Maurer points out that new ideas are often a response to established attitudes and conventional practices.

‘From an order it is possible to jump out. From chaos it is not possible to jump out because it has no direction. The play has an order.’

In the creative professions we too can have an uncomfortable relationship with mathematics. We regard it as too cold and clinical, too dry and rational. And yet I have found that it helps to regard communication campaigns as exercises in theme and variation, rhythm and repetition; to think of brands as managed patterns of actions and ideas.

In the 1980s, as the Cold War thawed, Maurer embraced vibrant colour in her work. She became fascinated by the way colours change in different light conditions, and images are distorted by perception. She painted geometric grids - in red, blue, orange, purple and black - that shimmer and shift the longer you look at them. They warp on the walls.

Overlappings 38 by Dora Maurer

More recently Maurer has created her Form Gymnastics. Blue, yellow and green shapes flutter weightlessly across the gallery. Bold overlapping colours fly elegantly through space, creating impressions of rhythmic movement on curved surfaces. They’re really rather beautiful.

In a recent interview Maurer was asked to describe her work. In reply the still vigorous Hungarian artist, now in her 80s, quoted the poet Walt Whitman.

'I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.’

Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself'

No. 307