Dora Maar:Contact Prints
15.10 – 19.11.2022
Closed
Hours
Monday to Friday
10:00 am – 5:30 pm
Gallery
45 Maddox St
London
W1S 2PE
Huxley-Parlour are delighted to present an exhibition of contact prints by surrealist photographer, Dora Maar. Taken throughout the 1930s, the works in the exhibition provide an intimate encounter with Maar’s early photographic interests and her preoccupation with the subtle and uncanny. The exhibition anticipates her later foray into surrealism for which she is renowned today. Contact Prints is testament to her position as both an innovative photographer and important figure in twentieth-century Modernism.
Dora Maar: Contact Prints demonstrates the beginnings of a surrealist oscillation between the banal and the absurd. Spanning unpeopled Parisian rooftops, off-guard acquaintances, and sun-dappled bodies of open water, Maar’s photography is indiscriminate, capitalising on quiet, unseen detail. Her work displays a surrealist magnetism towards found objects and compelling juxtapositions in the everyday that would inform her later, more experimental, photomontage.
Maar took pictures using a handheld, rolleiflex camera, the portability of which allowed her to take photographs quickly and with ease. Whilst surrealist photographers such as Eugène Atget and later, Brassaï, made use of the eeriness of empty, Parisian streets to create surreal compositions, thinkers such as André Breton wrote surrealist texts exploring the uncanny quality of cosmopolitan living and its relationship to the psychogeographies of the mind. Similarly, the works in Contact Prints belie a perambulatory preoccupation with the city and the people that inhabited it.
The exhibition is held at HUXLEY-PARLOUR, 45 Maddox Street. It is open Monday-Saturday. 10am-5.30pm on weekdays and 10am-1pm on Saturdays.
THE EXHIBITION
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