“6 out of 5” at White Cube Mason’s Yard is an exhibition of works by Hungarian artist Dóra Maurer – the first exhibition in the UK to showcase the artist’s entire career to date.Dóra Maurer is widely regarded one of the most important members of the Hungarian avant-garde and one of Eastern Europe’s most experimental artists of the past 50 years.Maurer’s rigorous and conceptual practice spans the mediums of painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and filmmaking.With a focus on the grammar of geometry and mathematical systems and methodologies, Maurer explores the relationship between space and movement.Embracing immediacy and informed by versatility of form and seriality, Maurer conducts what she describes as “research with the methods of art.”“6 out of 5” includes several signature black and white photographic series from the 1970s, drawings from the 1980s, and paintings dating from the late 1990s to the present.The exhibition also includes two major wall installations created especially for the occasion, derived from the artist’s IXEK work-cycle.To find out more about “6 out of 5” (at White Cube until July 9) and her fascinating practice, BLOUIN ARTINFO got in touch with the artist and asked her a few questions.What are the main influences and motivations that have informed and directed your practice?After I left the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, in my first working period (1961-65) I was mostly making etchings in an abstract, near surrealistic way. The Old Masters Martin Schongauer and Lucas van Lyden (15th century) were a source of inspiration both from a technical perspective and in terms of their disciplined approach.As I wished to be closer to everyday life/reality I discovered movement/flux in more senses and reduced it for my personal usage to ideas of displacement, and shifts. At the end of the 60s I travelled to Vienna, Cologne, Dusseldorf etc., to see galleries and art fairs and was interested in every actual art idea like actions, art informel, minimal art, arte povera, op art, concrete-constructivism. My husband, who had trained as an architect, at this time began working with geometric abstraction and exhibited together with other constructivist artists. This environment accelerated my concentration on reduced forms.How has your practice developed and evolved over the course of your career?More work-cycles followed each other, step by step. In brief these are:-the printed graphic, not as image but as a document of action – pedotypes as time-pieces;-photo series: photographically documenting phases of minimal movements and other serial variation photoworks.-experimental film, which I was drawn to through the practice of making elemental observations-drawing, object-making, using colours: using magic squares as metaphors, experimenting with the serial shifting of quantities in a grid; experimenting with the serial shifting of equal colour-marked planes in a grid and with shaped object/images: Quasi-Images in plane, in real and virtual space, constructed in perspective and projected on to several formed spaces, in particular on to the sphere.-currently I am working on dynamic IXEK-works and Bi-Tri- Quadricinia, the études of colour-chords. (Bicinia, etc. were polyphonic music pieces for voices in the Renaissance.)Could you explain the new wall works that you have created for the exhibition at White Cube?You will find in the exhibition some artworks with the title IXEK. The forms of the two wall installations derived from this work-cycle IXEK. (In Hungarian IXEK is the plural of the letter X (Ix))In these earlier works, two or three rectangular colour planes intersect and penetrate one another virtually. They appear to form closed perspective-constructed sculptural groups made from transparent materials.The forms of the two new wall installations derive from this work-cycle IXEK: I separated their elements but kept the warped perspective played out in the IXEK series.For each of the wall-installations I chose five of these elements and placed them in rows. Now the individual elements seem to propose undefined situations, therefore I call the installations “stages”.
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