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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.