Hungarian artist and teacher whose avant-garde works ranged from painting and photography to performance
Talking to the Art Newspaper in 2019, Dóra Maurer made a surprising claim. Her work, she told the interviewer, benefited “from a lack of market”.
It seemed an odd thing to say. The Hungarian artist, who has died aged 88, was about to have her second show at White Cube in London. If an exhibition at Jay Jopling’s fabled gallery was the stuff of dreams – its stable includes such multimillion-pound giants as Anselm Kiefer and Damien Hirst – this was not, however, reflected in Maurer’s own prices. One of her paintings had been auctioned at Sotheby’s three years earlier for £8,000 – a bargain basement figure for a major contemporary artist.
All this was set to change. In the month of her show at Jopling’s gallery, another, year-long exhibition opened at Tate Modern. Bringing together 35 pieces from the half-century of Maurer’s practice, the Tate show was greeted by British critics with baffled admiration. From lens-based art to performance to neo-abstraction, here was an artist whose work tracked the history of contemporary art, and did so with extraordinary power. Yet, for the most part, no one had heard of her.
