Like many avant garde artists working under the radar in Eastern Europe before the fall of Communism, Dóra Maurer (b. 1937) never had a studio and worked at home. In Hungary, as across the USSR, artists who shunned Soviet-decreed socialist realism did so quietly. Their experiments were shown in private flats and student and cultural centres, pop-ups whose pop was kept deliberately low-key.

The Hungarian state’s response to these activities was inconsistent but Maurer was more fortunate than many: her marriage to another artist, Tibor Gáyor, who had Austrian citizenship, let her experience Western art and galleries, and show her work outside Hungary. Despite her exposure in the West, Maurer remains relatively little known. The Tate has had two prints since 1985 but hardly shown them, and only in recent years has she appeared consistently in museum surveys of international art. This, her first significant UK museum show, is happening in her eighties.

Maurer’s work is diverse formally — photography, film, drawing, printmaking, painting, sculpture — but consistent in its use of conceptual systems. Much of it unpacks simple actions. It’s too neat to link this to her journeying between East and West, especially given how arcane and abstract the work can be, but Maurer did once say that “motion was change, existential change for me”.

Her photographs are based in performance. In What Can One Do With a Paving Stone? (1975), a response to a Hungarian critic’s call for artists to use these symbols of political protest and street activism, she hugs and kisses a stone, wraps it in cloth, drags and hoists it with rope and sets fire to it.

In the six frames of Seven Twists (1979), she plays with the idea of mise en abyme, where an image is contained within itself, endlessly repeating. She initially captures herself holding up a square of blank white photo paper. In the second image she holds up the first, at a 45-degree angle. She repeats the trick so that by the sixth photo, we’re met with a vortex of hands and eyes. In her film Relative Swingings (1973-75), the image and its making are shown as one. We see a lamp or a cylinder on part of the screen, rocking, before an inset shows us how it was done: the lamp static, the camera moving; the camera static, the lamp moving; both camera and lamp moving. It’s oddly hypnotic.

Where Maurer brings her systems to her Displacements drawings, she enters a more sensual realm. A rigid grid underpins them but through using coloured lines tracing the grid and bridging it diagonally, she creates planes in different hues that seem to glide across the surface. She places relief paintings on wood, which she calls Quasi Images, within the drawings, using bolder colours and thicker lines. She then detaches these paintings from the drawings, leading to her most conventionally modernist works, studies of colour relationships within geometric compositions, evoking the Bauhaus teachings of Josef Albers, whose seminal text Interaction of Colour Maurer has translated into Hungarian.

In these, she was partly inspired by her experience of creating murals for Buchberg Castle in Austria, and seeing how colour was affected by natural light and by being captured on film. Sadly, the gallery doesn’t have daylight so we can’t witness the shifting colour effects in different lights that she noted.

But we can see how the vaulted spaces of the castle affected her image-making in Space Paintings (1984-86), some of the show’s finest works. Here she projected her grids onto folded and distorted photographic paper, and followed their kinks and curves in her customary hues, creating meshes of pure colour.

In Maurer’s most recent works she creates what she calls a “gymnastics of form” — overlapping bold blocks and curves of colour, with optical illusions and spatial disruptions, a push-and-pull between surface and depth, transparency and opacity.

They’re her most pleasurable works, yet thin conceptually, while much of the work is the reverse, cerebral yet visually dry. Only occasionally does Maurer achieve a balance of idea and image. So while it’s timely and beautifully installed, this show mostly underwhelms.

Until Jul 5, 2020 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk)