The Geometry Gym:Dora Maurer @ the White Cube, Bermondsey.

I like maths - and I like art - and there's a sense of the two being combined in Dora Maurer's recent exhibition at Bermondsey's White Cube Gallery (where she shared gallery space with Mona Hatoum). In all of Maurer's work in fact. Which pleased me. But beyond finding it nice to look at, I'd struggle to say I truly understand what it is that underpins her art or why she makes it.

IXEK 9 (2013)

Literature available at the front desk speaks of "movement and indeterminancy", "the grammar of geometrical forms", "systematic analyses", and "mathematical methodoligies" and explains that these paintings, made in the last three decades, "explore geometry and perspective" and that she was deeply inspired by Josef Albers' 1963  book Interaction of Color.

Indeed, these distorted squares and rectangles do make bold use of colour and geometry and they are, as promised, "elegant and fluid" but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily detain you for long. They are, to my eyes, purely decorative - and there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. Some people like to look at something that looks pretty. It's only natural. I am one of those people!

IXEK 6 (2010)

Quod Libet 47 (1998/2000)

Overlappings 8 (2002)

Maurer was born in Budapest in 1937 and works in film, painting, performance, photography, and sculpture. This is, necessarily, just a small example of what she does (there's a bigger show on at the Tate) but it seems that all her work is informed by complex mathematical processes.

We don't, particularly, need to be told that. We can see it, and anyone mature artists needn't showing their workings out in the margins. But if Maurer is aiming for the kind of op-art, or even trompe l'oeil, trickery of someone like Bridget Riley or her compatriot Victor Vasarely she has, for the most part, fallen slightly short.

IXEK 7 (2011)

IXEK 17B (2017)

There are three separate series' of works in the White Cube show. IXEK, Overlappings, and Quod Libet. It's difficult to work out where one series ends and another begins, to be honest. The whole show feels like one large piece of work. There were individual works that appealed to me more than others (the piercing red of IXEKs 10 & 7 or the open grid of Quod Libet 47) but, for the most part, it was all easy on the eye and in no way challenging.

Some did look like optical illusions from a distance. Close up less so. I don't think that was Maurer's intention though. I think she just enjoys making art via a process, almost letting the machines take over, and what she comes up with is pleasant enough, it makes for a nice diversion, and then you move on. So that's what I did.

Overlappings 10 (2002)

Quod Libet 63 (2015)

Quod Libet 53 (2015)

Overlappings 34 (2006)

IXEK 10 (2013)

Overlappings 1 (1999)