Process as a Guiding Line: Dóra Maurer at Tate Modern

Dóra Maurer, Overlappings 38, 2007

Two sheer and twisting rectangles fly across the wall, casting a shadow. Yellow seems to overlay the blue layer to create a green swath down the front. The work Overlappings 38, in the final gallery of the Dóra Maurer exhibition at Tate Modern, seems to take the history of geometric abstraction and do a joyful grand jete. How did we get here? The 35 works in this retrospective chart a processual and conceptual path across approximately five decades of making to reach the joyful state of this 2007 work. Form and color seem to float, transcending repressive policies of the Socialist Hungarian government in the earlier half of Maurer’s career and the ongoing understanding of abstraction today as a legacy of a Western, male-dominated Minimalism.

Installation view, Dóra Maurer at Tate Modern, August 5, 2019 – July 5, 2020

The exhibition manages to tell the story of Maurer’s long career with a relatively tight selection of work. Maurer is known as a Conceptual artist, working in Hungary in the Socialist period when such approaches (or anything not Socialist Realist) were not supported by the state. The first gallery presents Maurer’s wry humor in response to the repressive environment, her process-based work–obsessed with perception, and the milieu that she worked within in Budapest. Hidden Structures I-VI shows the elegant and minimal forms that Maurer’s processual structures often take in this early period of her career, where she was settling into a life making and teaching art in Budapest. Hidden Structures consists of six white sheets of paper, folded and then rubbed with graphite across the top third. Each one is folded like the one before it, plus one additional fold. The folds create the impression of lines in the absence of mark making, and the composition grows in complexity as this process is followed. This reductive approach–exploring what could be done with simple pieces of paper and graphite in the absence of drawing–becomes elevated through precision and care into an elegant, almost metaphysical, consideration of what a drawing can be. The light and tangible presence of the works, encased so that their delicate three-dimensionality comes through even framed, makes them feel like an embodied thing rather than an act of representation. 

Dóra Maurer, Hidden Structures I-VI, 1979

Beautiful, surely. What kind of otherworldly realm does it operate in? Certainly not one that evokes the Socialist context of Budapest at the time, and the restrictive view of what art should look like (representational, populist) as determined by official government ministries. To make art so otherworldly in a system that demanded the production of Socialist Realist images is in itself a rejection of that political system and its demand on art making. In the same room, we also see a clear engagement with the political context: KV’s 1st of May Parade on Artificial Ground from 1971 is a sequential series of photographs focused on a young pair of legs coming out from a skirt to walk in a circle in a room, trodding over a rectangle of mushed paper for a quarter of that repetitive journey. You see that it is repetitive because of the depth of the path through the paper and the wet, dark marks tracked over the rest of the circle. Maurer photographed a young neighbor walking over newspapers inside a room, in contrast to the customary marching in the public celebration of International Workers Day on the streets outside. The red ink used in the newspapers on this day tracked into a red circle, not registering as such in the black-and-white photographs but hinted at in the red border the photographs are presented in. This benign action confronts many expectations of the socialist society, by privileging a private singular experience over a public experience and by walking over the channels of official communication and their rhetoric rather than reading them.

Dóra Maurer, Timing, 1973/1980

The second room introduces us to Maurer’s work in film, produced concurrent to and in fruitful juxtaposition with her practices in other media. Given the sequential manner of Hidden Structures and 1st of May Parade, it makes sense that Maurer was interested in experimenting with film, a medium that it literally comprised of a series of stills. Three films of the 1970s–Troilets, Relative Swingings, and Timing–are on view in one darkened gallery, creating a dizzying experience for the visitor. These works retain an experimental quality and indeed were not shown as art works per se. Films like Timing, which depicts a pair of hands unfolding a light cloth in an otherwise darkened room until the cloth takes up the whole screen, relates to the folds and sequential structures of Hidden Structures closely, as if Maurer could effortlessly transition her experiments in process across medium. Spare and elegant, this seminal body of work from the 1970s–largely on paper or film, in black and white–is what is deservedly known and lauded today. What is exciting is the way that the exhibition continues into the present, giving testament to the evolution of the study of perception and process and to Maurer’s more recent commitment to painting.

Installation view, Dóra Maurer at Tate Modern, August 5, 2019 – July 5, 2020

The next gallery jumps through space and time in a fragmented, truncated way. Mirrors in cut wooden frames in 4 Out of 3 (1976) hang in front of a similarly disjointed wall composition 5 Out of 4 (1979), chopping up the space visually. Even here, the fragmentation of space is arrived at methodically, driven by an internal order. Both works challenge borders and where the visual experience starts and ends. This idea is perhaps best exemplified by the Buchberg experience of 1983 that shifted Maurer’s practice, allowing her process of displacement–a method where one color determines the next–to move on to a bigger scale.

Installation view of Dóra Maurer, Space Painting, Buchberg Project, 1982-3. Photo: Dóra Maurer. Kunstraum Buchberg. Image here.

In 1983, Maurer painted the tower room of the medieval Buchberg Castle in Austria from floor to ceiling, applying her process of displacements onto an architectural environment with sloped ceilings and changing natural light. Maurer describes this project as a key work in her practice. The displacement of color and line create the sensation that everything is off kilter–that there is no perspectival viewing point. In the exhibition, this project is represented in drawings and a fantastic Super 8 film that Maurer made to document the process of painting the tower room. The perspectival distortions spawned a new practice of “space paintings,” where Maurer projected grids onto folded photographs, creating overlays of pure color according to her system.

Dóra Maurer, Stage II, 2016

The final gallery shows work made as recently as 2016. Sweeping arcs and shapes come across the wall, with some overlapping of hue that further suggests a light, ethereal quality. The dynamism and seeming motion is generated internally by a logic that Maurer has been chasing for much of her career. Like kites in the sky, there is a freedom to these paintings that is ever so gently tethered to the earth. They seem to almost come off the wall or have been painted on a three-dimensional surface rather than a flat canvas. As someone previously familiar with the Maurer’s early work, one of the wonderful things about this exhibition is that it continues through to the present, giving a sense of the ongoing depth of Maurer’s artistic practice. Here as earlier, Maurer’s work is marked by a nuanced attention to perception and a combination of elegance and playfulness that is well worth a long look.

Dóra Maurer is on view  at Tate Modern until July 5, 2020.

Burgeoning Forms: Mrinalini Mukherjee at the Met Breuer

Mukherjee
Mrinalini Mukherjee, Sri (Deity), 1982

I feel astonished when I encounter powerful, oversized female forms in art; they are all too rare. In itself, that is a reason the exhibition of large knotted fiber works by Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee on view at the Met Breuer demands closer attention. Modernist forms expand freely across medium into humble and coarse textiles that recall their origin in a living world. Her hanging gods and goddesses invoke an experience of presence and awe, and they straddle (or collapse) ideas of Western and Indian art. All of which this concise exhibition of some thirty large textile sculptures, rippling with pockets and folds, and smaller groupings of Mukherjee’s ceramics and bronze demonstrates.

Mrinalini Mukherjee at Met Breuer
Fiber works made between 1982-1985. Installation view of Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee exhibition at the Met Breuer.

A strong hand in the design of the exhibition cuts the Met Breuer’s Brutalist interior into a serpentine path, lilac and neutral curtains delineating alcoves for groupings of the large hanging sculptures. Grouping the sculptures brings individual figures–created separately over many years–into tableaus that suggest narrative. Combined with the curtains, the effect is of refined theatrics. This might trivialize weaker work, but here each piece retains its gravitas. Their frontality, even in clearly three-dimensional works like the above, recalls the line up of a frieze or suggests characters on a stage. The exhibition text suggests that Mukherjee, although not religious, was inspired by Hindu temple carvings and paintings of gods and goddesses. The works are titled with names such as Yakshi (Female Forest Deity) and Rudra (Deity of Terror). Whether looking up at imagery in a temple or at Mukherjee’s larger-than-life sculptures, the intended impact is awe.

Mrinalini Mukherjee at Met Breuer
Mrinalini Mukherjee, Basanti (She of Spring), 1984

Mukherjee began working with rope while an art student in Baroda, India in the 1970s, under the guidance of K.G. Subramanyan. Subramanyan encouraged his students to abandon the Western divide between art and craft, and under his guidance she experimented with ways of braiding and knotting rope. Initial wall hangings quickly grew to embrace all the possibilities of this humble material as she developed ways of knotting that create internal support for her intricate and heavy organic forms. In works like Basanti (She of Spring), she brings a modern aesthetic (a turn to abstraction and an engagement with objecthood) to this rough material that recalls local craft traditions. Basanti was made in the 1980s, when Mukherjee was embarking on her most ambitious attempts to turn fiber into beings that hovered between the plant and animal kingdoms. She began to hang them from the ceiling so that they inhabited space as a free-standing sculpture rather than hanging flat against a wall. They spill out and over themselves, suggesting the growth of plants or the arrangement of organs as much as the human form.

Mrinalini Mukherjee at Met Breuer
Mrinalini Mukherjee, Woman on Peacock from 1991 and Pushp (Flower) from 1993.

As with flora and fauna, so with sexual organs, which the curator reads particularly in these two later works from the 1990s pictured above. One might understand Pushp (Flower) as one does many works by O’Keefe; in both cases representations of flowers begin to seem more and more like female genitals as you look. Here, it is many times larger than life-size. If Pushp is an enormous vulva confronting the viewer, it is one that exudes lifeforce and creates the sense of a powerful female sexual energy. A more complicated sculpture depicts a woman riding a peacock, that is, mounting a traditionally male animal in a union in which the female is the dominant force. This piece, her first fully free standing work, suggests a union not just of male and female, but human and animal, realms.

Mrinalini Mukherjee at Met Breuer
Installation view of Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee exhibition at the Met Breuer.

Mukherjee began to work more in clay and metal in the 1990s, spurred by a residency at a ceramics center in the Netherlands. She was also working less with rope; it had become more difficult to source and some dyes less available. Installations like the one above show her working with rounded, ribbed, and furled shapes, arising from the ground like plants in a garden. Even in smaller works, Mukherjee takes up space, and it is clear that the natural world is her main source of inspiration.

Mrinalini Mukherjee at Met Breuer
Installation view of Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee exhibition at the Met Breuer.

Mukherjee’s bronze palms likewise echo the natural world of plants and suggest fecundity pushed out to the limits of the natural, with thin leaves unfurling around long stamen. They are grounded in the natural world in their physical positions as well. They lie across the ground, preserved in the twists and furls of their making and with a soft sheen. These forms, much like those of nature, can seem grotesque as much as beautiful. Although concise, this exhibition overall allows one to see the artist expand, develop a mastery over form and material, and then continue on the next medium, from fiber to clay and bronze.

Mukherjee
Installation view of Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee exhibition at the Met Breuer.

Muherjee’s practice of working in textile set her apart from many artists of her generation, as it has for so many who have gravitated to the medium of cloth and textiles, arts often associated with the home and the work of women. The scale and power of Mukherjee’s fiber works, combined with the controlled, elegant folds and braids that seem to hold them up, gesture to the type of world that might contain them. The phenomenological experiences of the fiber sculptures–how one feels in ones body in the presence of this larger, abstracted monstrous body–is that of an antediluvian past made present. It is well worth seeing in person to have that experience.

Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee is on view at the Met Breuer until September 29, 2019.

Hilma af Klint’s Vast Cosmic Synthesis at the Guggenheim

Installation view. Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future at the Guggenheim Museum, October 12, 2018 – April 23, 2019.

Between 1906 and 1915, a young artist in Stockholm worked tirelessly under the instruction of a set of spirit-guides to complete a set of 193 paintings. She dreamed that they would one day decorate a circular temple that spiraled upward. Over a hundred years later, that vision came partially true, with the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future installed in the Guggenheim’s high round atrium. Hilma af Klint’s work, largely unknown until about 30 years ago, feels like a surprise and revelation for several reasons. She was a successful female artist in Stockholm at a time when women did not have professional careers, and she was a visionary who painted abstract paintings avant la lettre. For the former, Hilma produced careful botanical illustrations; the focus of the exhibition is her magnificent body of abstract paintings, particularly the 193 paintings for the temple.

Group IX/UW, The Dove, No. 13. 1915. Oil on canvas.

The exuberantly colored paintings look as though they could have been made yesterday, so easily do they fit the visual mores of our time. Hilma intended these paintings “for the future”, when they would be more readily understood as diagrams that reveal the essential nature of the universe. Abstraction as we often understand it–simplifying the form of a real object like a tree or chair to get at its essential nature, for example–is not what is happening here. “Nonobjective” painting, which the Guggenheim was founded as a temple to, use geometries to attain a spiritual dimension instead of relating to the physical world. Hilma’s work, although spiritual and geometric, operates by yet another means.

Group VI, Evolution, No. 7. 1908. Oil on canvas.

The artist’s extensive notebooks and journals detail how she saw these works as diagrams of natural and scientific phenomena, such as atoms and evolution. It is as if she was attempting to make a periodic table of the cosmos in 193 paintings. A devout Christian, Hilma famously claimed that spirits guided her early work, telling her what to paint. Today that sounds like quackery. It was more common and accepted within society, and, indeed, the scientific community at the time. Her approach is painstaking: she strives for an accurate analysis of the systems of the cosmos using visual means. 

Installation shot, Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 5 – 8, Adulthood. 1907. Tempera on paper, mounted on canvas.
Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 1, Childhood. 1907. Tempera on paper, mounted on canvas.

The The Ten Largest series represents the different stages of life. Each line and color aligns with a complex symbology that Hilma created. For example, Hilma associated the blue of the above work with childhood. These ten paintings are presented in order of childhood, to youth, to adulthood, to old age on the Guggenheim’s walls, which is what the artist intended: they were meant to be seen as a series and only in that order can they represent that whole lifespan of a person. Hilma made these large, roughly 10×8-foot paintings on the floor (before Pollock). This series is the first you encounter at the Guggenheim, setting the stage for the exuberant and complex paintings the fill the circular ramp.

At the same time, watercolors like the gorgeous Tree of Life illustrations show how Hilma also worked on a very small scale. She was an inveterate planner and notetaker. Partially this is because she wanted to make sure future generations understood her work. Notebooks contain detailed instruction on different symbols or the meaning of certain colors. This care points to her confidence that future generations, if not her own, would appreciate the detailed, god-given visions that she presents.

Altarpieces (from left to right): Group X, No. 2, Group X, No. 3, Group X, No. 1. All oil and metal leaf on canvas. 1915.

After 1915, and a personal crisis, Hilma’s practice changed from one of explicit direction by spirit guides to a more self-directed selection of imagery, in series of paintings such as Evolution, Dove, Swan. For Hilma, the scientific and spiritual worlds were naturally conjoined, and so she moved easily between the subject matter of Evolution to the trio of Altarpieces (above). At the same time as Hilma explored a radically non-representational mode of painting, she was trained and successful as a botanical draftsperson, of which there are a few examples. Her life’s work, therefore, seems to have been one of vast synthesis. Hilma’s colorful iconography illustrates no less than the interconnected nature of all natural systems and world religions. Sweeping from the micro of a botanical illustration like the one below to the paintings above, Hilma could see a world in a grain of sand, and then create a visual analysis of its place in the cosmos.

Untitled. 1890s. Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper.

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future is on view through April 23 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.