Huxley-Parlour Gallery is presenting "Pathfinders," a groundbreaking exhibition featuring significant photographic works by three pioneering women artists: Ilse Bing, Kati Horna, and Dora Maar. Despite following different career paths, these three photographers shared an extraordinary sensitivity to modern life, capturing its rapid pace, fragmentation, and social disruptions through their revolutionary visual approaches.
Working during times of intense political turmoil, each artist directed their cameras toward street scenes, surreal subjects, and overlooked moments, creating an entirely new visual vocabulary for the Modern era. Their innovative techniques and perspectives helped establish photography as a legitimate artistic medium while documenting the complex realities of 20th-century life.
Ilse Bing (1899-1998) revolutionized photography through her precise use of a Leica camera, bringing radical accuracy to observations of everyday life. The exhibition features her compelling works depicting dancers at the famous Moulin Rouge and dynamic circus performers, showcasing her exceptional ability to capture clarity within motion. Additional pieces displaying fleeting urban moments shot from innovative and unexpected angles exemplify the emerging language of New Photography and helped define the visual vocabulary of European Modernism.
As a German Jewish émigré, Bing faced significant personal challenges when she was detained in a French internment camp before successfully escaping to New York in 1941. During her time in America, she conducted groundbreaking experiments with night photography, though her work gradually adopted a more introspective and contemplative tone as she processed the profound experiences of exile and displacement.
Kati Horna (1912-2000) was born Katalin Deutsch and lived across multiple European cities including Budapest, Berlin, and Paris before relocating to Barcelona to collaborate with antifascist networks during the Spanish Civil War. Her powerful images of wartime Spain provide a distinctly gendered perspective on the brutal conflict, offering insights often overlooked in traditional war photography. Fleeing Nazi persecution, she emigrated to Mexico in 1939, where she became a central figure in Mexico City's vibrant community of exiled Surrealist artists, working alongside renowned figures such as Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo.
The exhibition showcases Horna's distinctive works featuring bodies distorted by glass and figures obscured by masks, demonstrating her personal photographic language deeply rooted in theatrical and uncanny elements. Her images reveal a unique artistic vision that blended documentary photography with surrealist sensibilities.
A remarkable collection of vintage contact prints from the 1930s highlights Dora Maar's (1907-1997) exceptional sensitivity to juxtapositions of form, surface, and surreal elements. Her haunting images of mannequins, deserted streets, and fractured reflections create subtle dislocations of reality that challenge viewers' perceptions. Working with a handheld Rolleiflex camera, Maar embraced urban life while simultaneously revealing its underlying strangeness and psychological complexity.
Maar's promising photographic career was severely disrupted by the Nazi occupation of Paris, forcing her into a period of withdrawal and deep introspection that profoundly influenced the tone and subject matter of her later artistic work. This experience of trauma and isolation became integral to understanding her artistic evolution.
While each artist developed her own distinct practice and aesthetic approach, when viewed together, these three singular interpretations of Modernism chart a fascinating path of artistic reinvention and innovation. Their collective body of work spans multiple decades and continents, evolving from Surrealist-influenced street photography to sophisticated experimentation with photomontage, solarization, and other advanced darkroom techniques.
The "Pathfinders" exhibition brings these three remarkable artistic bodies of work into meaningful dialogue, illuminating how each photographer fundamentally shaped photography as a modern way of seeing and interpreting the world. Their artistic trajectories mirror those of countless other creative individuals displaced by war and authoritarianism—figures whose lives were dramatically rerouted by historical events and whose artistic visions permanently bear the profound imprint of exile and displacement.
Together, Bing, Horna, and Maar forged entirely new artistic routes characterized by resistance, reinvention, and the transformative power of imagination, leaving an indelible mark on the history of photography and modern art.
The exhibition "Pathfinders: Ilse Bing, Kati Horna, Dora Maar" will run from July 18 through September 13, 2025, at Huxley-Parlour Gallery, located at 45 Maddox Street, London W1S 2PE. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 11:00 AM to 5:30 PM, and Saturdays from 10:00 AM to 1:30 PM. Entry to the exhibition is completely free of charge. Additional information is available at www.huxleyparlour.com.
