Ollin

Dóra Maurer

DisplacementsQuasiImage
DisplacementsQuasiImage

Dóra Maurer (Budapest, 1937 to 2026) was a Hungarian painter, printmaker, photographer, and filmmaker. Her work kept asking one question: what happens to a form when a rule moves it? She graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1961 as a graphic artist. A scholarship took her to Vienna in 1967. There she met the architect and artist Tibor Gáyor, who became her husband, and for three decades they lived between Vienna and Budapest. Her first systematic works were prints and photographs: metal plates dropped onto the paper from a height, a small action broken into its phases and shown in every order the phases allow (Reversible and Interchangeable Phases of Movement, 1972), and a self-portrait photographed again and again until the prints build up a spiral (Seven Twists, 1979). With Miklós Erdély she ran creativity exercises for young people in Budapest from 1975 to 1977. From 1990 she taught at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, where she became a full professor.

The Displacements began in the early 1970s; Tate holds a system drawing of 1972. She stated the scene herself, in words László Beke quotes in his essay Objective Tenderness (1994): "The point of departure and the scene is a rectangular surface with 4:5 proportion sides, which is divided into 10x10 units by a grid. Lying on this surface, there are two congruent planes." The upper plane is ruled with diagonal lines in warm colors and the lower one in cold colors. Each plane is divided into four parts of equal territory, and those parts are what moves: "The fields are displaced by one step from left to right, according to the grid units. By moving the cold colors in diagonal and the warm ones in vertical and horizontal directions, we can observe very complex situations of overlapping." Beke traces the rule to her study of how magic squares are built. Displacements 1-6 (1976), six gouaches in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, begins with a contrasting pair in each corner: eight fields of 5 by 5 units in red, orange, yellow, brown, green, blue, purple, and turquoise. Displacements, Step 18 with Two Random-Quasi-Images (1976), promised to Tate, is the system at one step, ruled in thin colored lines on a raw canvas two meters tall. Two windows of its cells are painted in full.

From 1976 she stopped painting the whole system and painted details of it instead, chosen first by random numbers and later by eye. Each detail was enlarged until a cell or two filled the picture and every ruled line was a band of flat color. She called them quasi-images, because they "fail to comply with the requirements of image"; as she put it later, "they were only frozen frames of stages within a system." Quasi Image No. 1 (1977) is in the Ludwig Museum in Budapest. In 1986 she began cutting the white fields out, so the bands stood free on the wall as a lattice. In the 1990s she painted the same details again as relative quasi-images, a homage to Monet's series of one motif in changing light. Their colors, in the passage Beke quotes, are "broken or glowing and overturned". Her later paintings, the Overlappings from 1999 and the IXEK of the 2010s, bend whole planes of color and lay them across one another: "Since I apply the colours in transparent layers, they merge at the points where the shapes overlap and intersect."

She received the Kossuth Prize in 2003 and was named a Nation's Artist in 2021, and from 2017 she was president of the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts. Museum Ritter in Waldenbuch showed her work in 2014. Tate Modern's Dóra Maurer, from 5 August 2019 to 24 January 2021, was the largest exhibition of her work in Britain, with some thirty-five prints, photographs, films, and paintings. The Kunsthalle Bielefeld gave her a retrospective in 2022. She died on 14 February 2026, aged 88.

She belongs in this set because her rule is a program in all but name: a scene, a set of parts, one move a step, and the pictures as the system's states, with chance choosing which detail becomes a painting. The two sketches here run her stated system and give it back in the files they export.

Learn more:

Recreations here

  • Displacements: the system, after the Displacements of 1972 to 1976. A grid of 10 by 10 units on a surface of 4:5, and on it eight parts of 5 by 5 units, a warm and a cold one starting together in each corner as a contrasting pair: red and green, orange and blue, yellow and violet, brown and turquoise. Every part is ruled with one diagonal a cell and keeps a lane of its own a little off the grid, so lines that coincide run side by side as a bundle instead of hiding each other. Each step moves a warm part one unit along the border toward the next corner and a cold part one unit along the diagonal toward the opposite one. After five steps every part rests in a corner again, and twenty steps bring them all home. Her words give the directions; the paths from corner to corner and back are this sketch's reading of them, the one that keeps every part on the surface. look picks the raw canvas, with windows cells chosen by random numbers and painted in full, or the gouache sheet on white paper. seconds is the length of a step, which rests on the grid and then glides to the next. The seed deals the corners, the turn, and the windows, and a press deals the next. An original Ollin interpretation written from the paintings and her own statement of the system; there is no code to port, the work was ruled and painted by hand.
  swift run Example-Recreations-DoraMaurer-Displacements

Every part comes back as a rectangle and its diagonals as lines at their own two ends, so the rule can be read from the file: each part 5 by 5 cells on the grid apart from its lane, where the rule puts it at that step, one unit from where it was a step before, and every band in a window on one of the system's lines. A step is a second, so --at 18 is step 18:

  swift run Example-Recreations-DoraMaurer-Displacements --seed 1 --export-svg displacements.svg --at 18
  • QuasiImage: one detail of the same system, enlarged, after the Quasi-images of 1977 on. The seed deals the system as Displacements does, so one seed is one system in both sketches. Then random numbers pick a window, one and a quarter, nearly two, or two and a half cells wide, around the middle of the grid where the parts overlap, and the canvas is that window. Each part's edges and diagonals are bands a tenth of a cell wide, the warm plane over the cold one. Over a cycle of twenty steps the bands slide through the window and come back. look picks the system's own colors on white, the broken colors of a relative quasi-image, or the white fields cut away and the bands hung on the wall over their shadow. A press deals the next. An original Ollin interpretation written from the paintings and her statement of the system; there is no code to port.
  swift run Example-Recreations-DoraMaurer-QuasiImage

The window and the step can be read back from the file: every part is 5 by 5 cells of one size, apart from its lane, where the rule puts it, and one unit from where it was a step before. A step is 1.2 seconds, so --at 8.4 is step 7. The cut look lays its shadow from a layer, which has no vector form, so read the file of one of the other two:

  swift run Example-Recreations-DoraMaurer-QuasiImage --seed 1 --export-svg quasi.svg --at 8.4

This is a homage after Dóra Maurer, made for learning. It isn't a reproduction of a specific work, and it isn't affiliated with or endorsed by the artist or her estate.

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