Dôra Maurer  was born in 1937 and still seems to be going strong.  She is Hungarian but as she pointed out there is no need to characterise works on  the basis of their nationality.

 

In fact her work is part of the story of international modernism and  much of it can be seen as conceptually based. This may sounds chilly  but there is an  underlying warmth which makes it very appealing. It is systemic but the systems are simple and mostly easy to work out.

 

 

In 1971, not long after the events of May 1968, she and her husband both made work about paving stones. He lay down underneath a pile but she embraced the stone and  wrapped  and cradled it.  A lot of her work is based on games of perspective, in which she used her body as the yardstick. In Parallel Lines she and  a friend raced down  the outside corridor of two facing apartment blocks. The geometry is gently skewed by the fact that they don’t quite pass at the middle point.

 

 

She told an interviewer that she liked to live and work at the same time. This might be more of an achievement than it seems at first. Certainly I got progressively more engrossed by the mixture.

 

Dôra Maurer is at Tate Modern until 7 July 2020.