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Dóra Maurer
Born in 1937 in Budapest, Hungary / Lives in Budapest, Hungary

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): How did you become an artist?

Dóra Maurer (DM): I studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in the painting department, and later  in the graphic and etching department. I had begun already in high school but then came the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 that changed my life. I was very naive before then, but after the revolution I felt more responsible toward issues of daily life. I found my ancestors in the field of art after the revolution. This searching led to a series of etchings, my early works, which relate very deeply to the idea of experience. After I finished with this series I turned to another path and became interested in movement, and that  is when I made more etchings, in 1970.

AP: We are looking at Throwing the plate from very high (1970) and Dropping acid to the plate (1970). Both will be in the biennial and have titles that describe the “damaging” actions made with the etching plates—throwing them from a balcony and spilling acid on them—and are composed of photographs of the act, and the prints with the “damaged” plates. And you made just two of them?

DM: Yes, and they are unique, I don’t like to repeat myself. After that I made a lot of observations in the field of nature. I was always interested in biology.

AP: In relation to your interest in movement, you later came to the Study of Minimal Movements (1972), also to be exhibited in the biennial. Was American Minimalism a reference for you, then?

DM: No, I had not seen it. I was interested in “the minimum,” and my central notion was the shift. The shift could be understood in terms of movement, of meaning, on the map, in a country.

AP: What about the Hidden  Structures Series (1977) drawings?

DM: The basic idea came to me while I was a teacher in a free school. I wanted to give questions to the students so that they could better understand spatial relations and different layers. I was at a conference that was very annoying and made the folded paper. In the actual work, in one case there is a rectangle that becomes a square, and through the folding of the paper everything falls down under the square. I then made a frottage on the folded paper.

AP: So that the marks that the frottage imprints on the paper correspond to the folds of the paper, which is afterward displayed unfolded.

DM: Even with very few changes in the folding process, very different compositions emerge.

AP: There is a dialogue between  the two-dimensional and the threedimensional, and there is the element of interactivity.

DM: Yes, if you have the work in your hands, if it is not hanging on the wall, you can play with it.