Huxley-Parlour Gallery is presenting 'Pathfinders,' a major exhibition featuring important photographic works by three pioneering female artists: Ilse Bing, Kati Horna, and Dora Maar. While shaped by different life trajectories, these three artists shared an acute sensitivity to modern life - its speed, fragmentation, and upheavals.
Working in the shadow of political turmoil, each artist turned her camera toward the street, the surreal, and the forgotten, forging a new visual language for the modern era. Their artistic journeys reflect those of countless other creators displaced by war and authoritarianism, figures whose lives were disrupted by history and whose visions bear the imprint of exile.
Ilse Bing (1899-1998), working with a Leica camera, brought radical precision to observing everyday life. The exhibited works depicting Moulin Rouge dancers and circus performers testify to her quest for clarity in movement. Other works, representing fleeting urban moments photographed from innovative and unexpected angles, are characteristic of the emerging 'New Photography' language and helped define the visual lexicon of European modernism.
A German Jewish emigrant, Bing was interned for a time in an internment camp in France before fleeing to New York in 1941. There she experimented with night photography before her work took a more introspective turn, reacting to exile and displacement. Her later photography reflected the profound impact of forced migration on her artistic vision.
Kati Horna (1912-2000), born Katalin Deutsch, lived in Budapest, Berlin, and Paris before settling in Barcelona to collaborate with anti-fascist networks during the Spanish Civil War. Her images of war-torn Spain offer a gendered and distinct perspective on this bitter conflict, capturing moments that male photographers often overlooked.
Fleeing Nazi persecution, Horna emigrated to Mexico in 1939, where she became a central figure in a community of exiled Surrealist artists, including Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. The works presented in the exhibition, featuring bodies distorted by glass and hidden by masks, demonstrate a personal photographic language rooted in the theatrical and the strange.
A set of vintage contact prints from the 1930s reveals Dora Maar's (1907-1997) sensitivity to juxtapositions of forms, surfaces, and surrealism. Her images of mannequins, deserted streets, and fractured reflections offer subtle dislocations of reality. Working with a Rolleiflex camera, Maar embraced urban life while revealing its underlying strangeness.
Maar's photographic career was dramatically altered by the Nazi occupation of Paris, which led her to a period of withdrawal and introspection that profoundly shaped the tone of her later work. This forced isolation became a defining element in her artistic development during and after the war years.
Although each artist pursued her own practice, viewed together, these three singular approaches to modernism chart a path of reinvention. Their work spans several decades and continents, moving from street photography to Surrealist influences to experimentation with photomontage, solarization, and other darkroom techniques.
The 'Pathfinders' exhibition brings these three bodies of work into dialogue, illuminating how each artist shaped photography as a mode of modern vision. Together, Bing, Horna, and Maar blazed new trails shaped by resistance, reinvention, and imagination, leaving an indelible mark on the history of photography.
The exhibition 'Pathfinders: Ilse Bing, Kati Horna, Dora Maar' will run from July 18 to September 13, 2025, at Huxley-Parlour, located at 45 Maddox Street, London W1S 2PE. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Admission is free.
