International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

In memoriam Dóra Maurer (1937-2026)

The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen mourns the loss of Hungarian artist Dóra Maurer, who passed away in Budapest on February 14 2026 at the age of 89.

„We are deeply saddened to have heard the news of Dóra Maurer’s passing. It was a privilege and a great joy to show the oeuvre of this great Hungarian artist and filmmaker in a Profile in Oberhausen last year”, comments Oberhausen’s artistic director Madeleine Bernstorff.

Dóra Maurer, born in 1937, is considered one of the major figures of the Hungarian Neo-Avant-garde. As an artist, filmmaker and exhibition organiser, she worked with print, painting, photography, and experimental film. Maurer studied graphic art at the University of Fine Art in Budapest. From 1967, she was partly living in Vienna, which allowed her to travel to the West and research the possibilites of a metric-structuralist film. After having translated the lectures of Anton Webern to Hungarian, she started experiments to transpose serialism to film language. These influences, underpinned by the elemental ideas of graphic art – indexical traces, displaced variants, differing reproductions – unleashed a series of works that form a dialogue between coincidence and intention, structure and disorder, conceptuality and playfulness. She became one of the most significant artists of the Hungarian neo-avantgarde. Today we celebrate the legacy of her oeuvre, which testifies that even within the most rigid abstraction, seriality and modulations can bring the greatest freedom to the surface – the freedom that rewards those who entrust themselves to the requirements of their material and form. As one of the most influential teachers in Hungarian art education, Maurer also influenced generations of younger artists.

”I do not want to defeat material, but, by adapting to it, I want to ‘bring out’ of it what is possible. (...) I seek examples of randomness, which are actually not random, but instances arising out of the errors of performing actions based on an incomplete understanding of materials and processes. The interactions between materials cast new light upon rules that are not yet understood – not yet known by me. They can be observed and repeated, and this represents an extension of the tools of expression.”

Dóra Maurer in: Rézmetszet, rézkarc (Műhelytitkok sorozat) [Engraving and etching (part of a series entitled “Workshop secrets”)], Budapest: Corvina Kiadó, 1976, p. 40, quoted in: MAURER Dóra: Quod Libet, Vintage Galéria Budapest, 2020, p. 4

Oberhausen, 17 February 2026

Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, phone +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda@kurzfilmtage.de