Dóra MAURER: As You Like it

Dóra MAURER: As You Like it

The exhibition at Vintage Gallery presents a selection of Dóra Maurer’s works of recent years from the series entitled Quod libet, Overlappings, and IXEK. The title of the exhibition refers to one of the most important series of the artist’s oeuvre, the Quod libet pictures. Although the expression can relate to a musical composition, or it can also be a familiar type of Baroque trompe l’oeil still life, the use of the phrase Quod libet cannot be viewed as a specific art historical reference. The title relates much more to a creative method and artistic approach, characterised by an experimental spirit paired with playfulness. Maurer has aptly referred to her latter compositions, more poetic than all that came before, as a “form gymnastics”. The formations hovering in imaginary space are bending onto each other, and are often in a “reciprocal” relationship, we might even refer to as “film colors.” The imaginary movements of these forms call into being the intensive vibration of the complementary colours and the cold-warm contrasts, or their harmony filled with melancholy. Maurer’s art can be described as the free play of the changing constellations of moving planes – the entirety of her life oeuvre is the embodiment of a consistently unfurled conceptual programme, which, contrary to appearances, takes as its primary point of departure not artistic or mathematical, but rather epistemological questions. In the insightful words of Dieter Honisch, what interests Dóra Maurer “is not art, but reality and the perpetually changing manifestation of reality.” The exhibition presents new constellations of “the perpetually changing manifestations of reality.” According to the principle of “as you like it”, it is as if the configurations writing onto and into each other, similarly to musical scores, would “play” before our eyes the process of the birth of forms, and thus giving dynamic, yet motionless images of the joy of creation.

Dávid Fehér