Biography
She attended the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts between 1956-1961, her master was Gyula Hincz. From 1967 she lives in Vienna and Budapest. Between 1975-1977, she led the Creativity – Visuality course at Ganz-Mávag with Miklós Erdély (Creativity Practices). Between 1981-1983 she led a photography and film department at the Museum of Fine Arts (Indigo group); 1987-1991: held audiovisual exercises as a guest teacher at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts; Since 1990, she has been a teacher at the interdisciplinary painting department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts.
At the beginning of the 60s, her career began with etchings rich in sensitive, organic and grotesque forms (House of the Dead, Pompei series, 1964). Geometric weave, compositional net, filled with biomorphic elements characteristic of her works, in some cases they are representational, in others they are associative. Later on, she made indefinable shapes with surface treatments. The process was clearly about moving towards abstraction, as in the case of Fiore, made in 1963-1964, where she created a highly rustic wave surface. In the mid-1960s, the era of "psycho-realistic" etchings came to an end, and her toolbox expanded extremely quickly: collages, appliqués (e.g.: fur), creases, layers covering the drawings appeared in her works, which until then were basically produced using traditional techniques (PB 0, Hegy and man, etching, 1969). The motif of covering up, concealing, and hiding, which also played an important role in her later works, appeared already then.
At the end of the 1960s, she began to create conceptual works, where her toolkit was expanded with the use of photos and personal actions, such as the Very High Dropped Plate (1970), where the dropping of the plate appears on the photo, together with the image of the deformed plate. This kind of personal presence can be observed in several works (Streetstone action, 1971). At this time, she turned her attention to mathematically motivated serial works, natural actions, and other serial works. The extremely diverse materials – twigs, various packages covered with gauze, branches, ears of corn, reeds, etc. – objects created by classifying them into an increasing-decreasing system (Quantity Table,1972; Quantitative Tables 3., 1972), then the "abstracted", geometrically abstracted painting and plastic (relief) versions of the same mathematical system, then the magical he also created squares (Table of quantities 6., 1972).
Another larger group of Maurer's serial works can be classified under the problem of signs and traces. This includes very diverse art forms: the pedotypes, the first piece of which is May 1st Parade on Artificial Ground (1971), where a third of the "walk space" is a crumpled paper rectangle sprinkled with paint, and the rest is white paper, on which she walks and leaves her footprints the "private procession" in a circle with a diameter of one and a half meters. The fulfillment of this idea was also the pedotype realized in 1976 in the Helikon Gallery, with the active participation of the public.
The opposite of creating and documenting leaving a signal and erasing it, movements in the opposite direction are also characteristic of her serial works using text (I'd rather be a bird 1-4, 1971; Accumulation 1-2, 1973). The third line of Maurer's process art activity is the group of phase photo series, the research of minimal movements, where the organizing structure of quantity tables and the thought system of signaling are connected (Reversible and Interchangeable Movements, 1972). The planned recording of the processes of the minimal movements was really done with the help of the new tool, the film. In Maurer's art, displacement, as a central concept and idea, is constantly present, both in photography and film, and she examines the effect caused by the movement system of two or more objects interacting with each other and layering on each other (Displacement series, 1972-83).
In the middle of the 70s, the series of Quasi-pictures began, the creative principle of which is continuously present in her art. She selects a part of a geometric grid system by random selection, enlarges it, and places it in the plane, and later also in space (Serial drawing with two quasi images, 1976; Quasi image according to random data, 1977). Also, in the second half of the 70s, she makes the shifts and the 4-out-of-five type of image sequences. In the case of the former, a square is divided diagonally, then the resulting parallelograms are shifted relative to each other. From a technical and material point of view, very diverse sets of objects are created: graphics; object (Displacement of a square, 1974). The organizing principle of the 4 out of 5 types of images is the classification of different types of objects and shapes, divisions into different orders, e.g.: five different divisions of four squares, with omissions and colors, five positions of a carrot and the like (5 out of 4, 1976; 4 of five , 1979).
In addition to experimental films, the end of the 70s brought a new, graphic realization of the problem of hidden structures: the Hidden Structures frottage series was created by bending the folded sheet of paper under the sheet, and the resulting structure remains hidden, the various geometric units become imprints of forms that no longer exist (Hidden Structures 1-3., 1977-79). In the early 1980s, all of this naturally led to the Sluices, structural analyzes with light, liquid, and powder. Maurer went back to the idea raised in his 1972 work, Wind Signall, when she again began to study the movement behavior of various materials and record their impact.
Another decisive development of the 1980s was the coloring of Quasi-images and their exit into space. She distinguished and highlighted planes and volumes with colors and created shaped canvases (Quasi-image No. 86, 1983). The system of Quasi-pictures, which was created based on a pre-developed rule system indicating quantitative changes (movement) and providing a large amount of variation, was combined with aleatory highlighting and a hierarchy of cold and warm colors. The completion of the program was realized in 1982-1983, when Dieter Bogner asked her to paint the tower room of Buchberg Castle. In accordance with the "cutting pattern" of Space Painting plans (watercolor, paper, 1980-82), she projected the colored grid system designed on the plane onto the 14 m2 space and painted the illusionistic space. She documented the details and process of the painting with a series of photos and film (Space Painting,1983).
At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, she continued this program: the color world of the quasi-pictures constantly changed under the influence of different light and lighting conditions, and she painted this phenomenon again and again, this is the series of Relative quasi-pictures. The spatial possibilities also continued to expand, her shaped canvases "stepped off the wall" (Fallen Quasi-picture with basic form, 1986-91), or the curved forms within the plane were included in her toolbox (Mixed spatial objections IV. No. 9., 1993-96).
In the second half of the 1990s, she replaced the compositional system of eight standard colors with a more relaxed one (Hommage à Monet series), and then the problem of curved planes and space became the focus of her art (Curved plane, 1996). The realization of the continuous modulation of light and color relationships is the essence of the Rasterközi Quasi-kép series, which is also the continuation of the Displacements group two decades later Her filmmaking activity is closely related to her fine art work, it is an integral part of it, but at the same time, in addition to the visual possibilities of the media (image, color, movement), she also uses other tools - music, speech, noise, text - as an extremely creative creator. In addition to conscious and planned, constructed art creation, her very diverse artistic activity is sometimes not without irony and humor. Maurer's pedagogical, artistic and exhibition organizing activities are also of great importance.
