Pathfinders: Ilse Bing, Kati Horna, Dora Maar
Images of Modernity in Mayfair at Huxley-Parlour
Ilse Bing, Self-Portrait with Leica Camera, Paris, 1931. Image courtesy Huxley-Parlour
The year 1935 was significant for the photographer, Dora Maar. Living in Paris, she’d opened her own studio and started a love affair with Pablo Picasso. Maar’s career was on the up: her client list included Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Patou, and Chanel, and various stylish Parisien galleries were exhibiting her.
But Maar’s career did not flourish in a vacuum. During the inter-war period, the French capital nurtured others of Maar’s ilk: female, modernist and surrealist photographers. Most notable among these are Kati Horna and Ilse Bing. The three women undoubtedly rubbed shoulders in the cafés of Montparnasse and Montmartre, and now, almost a century after their conquering of Paris, they find themselves posthumously reunited in another important capital. The exhibition, Pathfinders, is on at Huxley-Parlour in the heart of London until the 13th of September.
The show is less about specific images, and more about the artists’ eye. It explores how they saw their subjects in the moment they chose to capture them. ‘Though each artist navigated her own distinct practice’, the exhibition text explains, ‘seen together, these three singular takes on Modernism chart a path of reinvention’.
The works exhibited span decades and continents, ‘moving from Surrealist inflected street photography to experimentation with photomontage, solarisation and other darkroom techniques.’ All three women had nomadic tendencies, travelling across Europe in their early careers.
For Bing and Horna, however, travel stopped being an artistic pursuit and became a matter of life and death. During the Second World War, both fled across the Atlantic Ocean, seeking refuge from Nazi persecution. ‘I fled Hungary, I fled Berlin, I fled Paris, and I left everything behind in Barcelona,’ Horna remarked near the end of her life. For the late artist, her chosen medium enabled a static moment in a world of turbulence and change: ‘it’s for vagabonds like me. Because my clothes got torn on the route, I selected photography.’
A selection of images from ‘Ode to Necrophilia’ (1962), some of Horna’s most notorious works, hang on the walls of Huxley-Parlour. The series portrays English painter Leonora Carrington mourning her husband, who is represented by a white death mask on an unmade, single bed.
Kati Horna, 'Ode to Necrophilia', 1962. Image courtesy Huxley-Parlour
In one portrait, Carrington stands in her undergarments, one hand holding an unfurled umbrella above her head, and the other cradling the death mask. In another, she is naked, her back turned from the camera. She holds a candle to the death mask, which is placed in the centre of the pillow. These photographs are studies of grief, desire, and absence; methodical attempts to materially bridge the distance between the living and the dead.
Unlike Horna’s ‘Ode to Necrophilia’ series, all the works featured by Bing and Maar are candid moments of street photography. Both were early adopters of the handheld camera. Maar opted for a Rolleiflex, and Bing a Leica – the device credited with popularising 35mm film photography. The small, snappy machines meant the photographers could capture fast moving events, or something which just happened to catch their eye. It’s unremarkable to us, living in the iPhone age, but provides a crucial context for these modernist photographers, who embraced urban life while hinting at its strangeness and oddities.
Kati Horna, Stairway to the Cathedral (Subida a la catedral), 1938. Image courtesy Huxley-Parlour
Bing’s ‘Reflection, Rue de Valois, Paris’ (1932) for instance, is a stunning example of the sharp eye she brought to the quotidian. The image simply depicts the upside-down reflection of buildings on a long, curbside puddle, but the artwork itself is more akin to an optical illusion, and continued inspection throws up new layers and textures. Bing displays Paris and New York through dizzying angles; her fascination with shadow, and geometrical shape characteristic of the emerging modernist language of art and design.
For Maar, it is all about the people: the subjects she captured fleetingly on her Rolleiflex record the most disadvantaged members of society. Several portraits from London include a blind violinist, a pearly kid and a band of one-legged singers on crutches. The latter provides a reminder of the era these women were living in – one where war is both a near past and present, with political and economic instability looming large.
Dora Maar, Pearly Kid - London, (Pearly Kid, Londres), 1934. Image courtesy Huxley-Parlour
Throughout this show, we hear again how ‘artistic trajectories echo those of countless other creatives displaced by war and authoritarianism, figures whose lives were rerouted by history and whose visions bear the imprint of exile’. However, these images and their interrogation of the commonplace also denote something far less sweeping.
These were photographs taken during period of rapid change. Bing, Horna and Maar’s photography shows displacement can be far more subtle than uprooting one’s life and resettling across oceans – it represents a shift in the here and now, between what was, and what has changed. Their ‘ways of seeing’ represent the altered state of the everyday.
VISITING INFO:
GALLERY NAME: Huxley-Parlour Gallery
ADDRESS: 45 Maddox Street, London W1S 2PE
DATES: 18th July 2025 - 13 September 2025