Bloody Thursday (1960 körül)

Dóra Maurer is a leading figure of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde generation and an internationally renowned artist. Between 1955 and 1961 she studied graphic art at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, where her master was Gyula Hincz. Her early etchings were influenced by the German Expressionism of the 1920s, Gyula Derkovits, Béla Uitz and the Berlin school of Neue Sachlichkeit. In her Blood-red Thursday, Maurer depicts the mass demonstration in Budapest on 23 May 1912, which was brutally dispersed by the police and soldiers who were called out. The event is named after the number of dead and wounded. According to art historian Emese Révész, the jury's head of the Képcsarnok, Magdolna Supka, found it too grotesque and had 32 heads redrawn. Already in this etching, Maurer plays with the different surfaces, see the wooden frame of the protest sign, the almost op-art-like top of the man sitting with his back to the right. Below him, as if the seamstress known from the Uitz etchings is burying her face in her arms, in the middle is the boy holding the Work, Bread! sign, who could be a character from Les Misérables. Among her peers, Béla Kondor's Soviet Republic series and Tamás Major's etchings show a kinship. Maurer's expressionist experimental etchings were on the borderline of formal art. Her eight-page diploma work (Everydays, 1961) was rejected by the examining board for being too modern, and she did not receive a diploma. 

Maurer saw etching as a medium. Her works after college are characterised by an unusual treatment of the surface of the copper plate, the development of particular textures and the richness of the surface, created by multiple etching, the imprinting of foreign materials, and the layering of different textures in a montage. The surfaces of her etchings are not lines, but biomorphic formations, which make Mauerer's work akin to the Surrealists and the bioromanticism of Ernő Kállai. In 1963 she went on a study trip to Italy. Her etchings Fiore (1963-1964), Pompeii (1964) and Metamorphosis are linked to this memory and experience. Maurer's so-called 'psychorealistic' period came to an end in the mid-1960s. The range of her tools was expanded: collages, various applications (e.g. hair), folds and surfaces covering drawings appeared in her etchings (e.g. PB O, Mountain and Man, 1969). 

Around 1970, a turning point in Maurer's work occurred: instead of the representation etched on the plate, the process and action of the print itself, as well as the print as document, became the focus of her artistic experiments. Between 1975-77, she held visuality workshops at Ganz-MÁVAG with Miklós Erdély under the title of "Exercises in Creativity". Between 1981 and 1983 she led a photography and film course (InDiGó group) at the Museum of Fine Arts. From the 1980s onwards, colour and space became the focus of her interest, while from the 1990s painting dominated, and she was concerned with the problems of the curved plane and space. In 2002, Dóra Maurer and Tibor Gáyor had an exhibition at the Municipal Art Museum in Győr, Hungary. In 2019, the Tate Modern in London presented 35 of her works, in 2022, Vienna's second largest building, the Ringturm, was completely covered by a Maurer painting.